Transistor

Transistor is a science-fiction action role-playing video game developed and published by Supergiant Games?, first released on May 20, 2014 for the PlayStation 4? and PC.¹⁹ The game casts players as Red, a famous singer who survives an assassination attempt and takes up a large sword-like weapon of unknown origin — the titular Transistor — which speaks to her in the voice of its unintended victim.²¹² Players fight through a futuristic city while piecing together the weapon’s mysteries and pursuing its former owners.¹ It was the second original game from the studio, following its 2011 debut Bastion?.²

Setting and gameplay

The game is set in a cyberpunk world, though the studio deliberately avoided a gritty backdrop in favor of what creative director Greg Kasavin described as a “romanticised, anachronistic quasi-futuristic city”.²⁶ Kasavin, who had been creative director on Bastion and served as Transistor’s writer, framed the cyberpunk aesthetic as a starting point the team twisted into something different, wanting the setting to feel richly detailed and full of mystery.⁶ Art director Jen Zee took inspiration from the Art Nouveau? movement and painters such as Gustav Klimt? and Alphonse Mucha?, whose elongated natural patterns and heavy use of gold gave the setting a vintage feel.⁶ Red is mute, her voice having been taken by her attackers, and narration comes instead from the Transistor itself — voiced by Logan Cunningham?, who had voiced the narrator Rucks in Bastion.¹² This marked a shift from Bastion’s omniscient, foreknowing narrator to a character experiencing the story as it unfolds.⁶ In the story’s early encounters, Red confronts spherical robots with glowing red eyes and learns that hundreds of people had gone missing in the city over a few months; the game’s shadowy enemy world is called The Process.¹²

Combat is viewed from an isometric perspective and can be played in real time or paused using a strategic planning mode called Turn(), which fades the background and overlays a reactive grid, letting players queue up a sequence of actions before executing them and then recovering.⁶¹² Red can move to points along the grid without being bound to them, and any queued action can be canceled before it executes; blocks rise from the ground during combat to serve as fragile cover.¹² The studio sought to combine “the real, immediate feel of a real-time game” with the tactical sensibilities of older isometric games, and made the planning mode a tool at the player’s disposal rather than a requirement.⁵⁶ Kasavin noted that during development different players balanced the two modes in very different ways, and that depending on the functions chosen a player could skew heavily toward either an all-out brawler style or a more tactical one.⁶

At the heart of the game is its Function system: 16 abilities, called functions, that can be installed as active powers, as upgrades to other functions, or into passive slots, yielding thousands of unique combinations.⁸ Studio director Amir Rao traced the system’s origin to the team’s love of collectible card games, particularly Magic: The Gathering, whose pleasure Rao located in knowing one’s deck yet improvising around the luck of the draw.⁸ Early prototypes experimented with a “deck” of abilities drawn and reshuffled over the course of a level, but the team could not find a natural narrative justification for repeatedly resetting the player’s skills in a linear story.⁸ The solution was a “slow death” mechanic whereby losing all health removes the player’s highest-value function for the remainder of an encounter; if all four functions in the action bar are lost, the player reloads at the last checkpoint.⁸ The team found this induced a more methodical playstyle and prompted many players to adopt new combinations, which they often kept even after regaining their favored functions.⁸ Collapsing powers, upgrades, and passive improvements into a single “function” concept let the studio build 16 strong ideas — such as stun, charm, or long range — that players could combine in ways that felt creative and empowering.⁸

Development

Supergiant Games began work on Transistor around 2012, growing from the seven-person team that made Bastion to twelve members, with an office in San Francisco’s SoMa district while some audio staff remained in New York.⁵¹¹ Founder Amir Rao had earlier been a level designer on Command & Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3 at Electronic Arts, where he met co-founder Gavin Simon and Kasavin; the function system was a close collaboration between the three.⁸ It was the first project the studio started with a full team on hand, and its pre-production cycle alone took longer than Bastion’s entire 18-month development.² Rao and Kasavin have described the project as the studio’s most challenging launch, marked by disagreements over the game’s direction; Kasavin said his working relationship with Rao, harmonious on Bastion, grew more fraught during pre-production.² For composer Darren Korb, finding the game’s sound took roughly six months of experimentation, a process he called “hair-pulling” and frustrating, complicated by writing from a specific character’s perspective and by Red being a famous singer.² Art director Jen Zee, by contrast, remembered the project fondly, describing the extended pre-production as a chance to evolve and improve on her Bastion work.²

Rao cited Fallout and Fallout 2? as major inspirations on the gameplay side, while other team members drew on turn-based games such as Final Fantasy Tactics?, all channeled into a more immediate, reactive context.⁵¹¹ The studio self-funded and self-published the game, reinvesting money earned from Bastion rather than seeking outside funding, and chose PlayStation and Steam because they permitted self-publishing — with the PS4 offering a rare chance to be part of a console launch.¹⁵ Kasavin credited Sony with being supportive of small teams and serious about maintaining a diverse software library on the PS4.⁶ Transistor was unveiled at PAX East 2013, an announcement the team nearly pulled at the last minute out of nervousness over its reception, but which went over far better than expected; the game was shown at PAX three times and E3 once before release.²¹¹

Transistor - Reveal TrailerSupergiant Games

Release and reception

The game launched on May 20, 2014 for PlayStation 4 and PC, alongside the Transistor Original Soundtrack of more than 60 minutes of music by Korb with vocals by Ashley Barrett, sold for $9.99 as a digital release and $11.99 with a compact disc, and later a vinyl edition; the soundtrack included an exclusive bonus track, “Signals”.¹⁹ It later came to OS X, Linux, iPhone, and iPad — the iOS version releasing in June 2015 — as well as the Apple TV in November 2015 and the Nintendo Switch.¹³⁹ The Steam version bundled the Windows, Mac, and Linux editions.⁹ The game was released worldwide with English voiceover and text in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese.¹ Game Informer’s Matt Miller scored it 9 out of 10.²

By the studio’s December 2015 year-end recap, Transistor had sold more than one million copies across all platforms, while Bastion had passed three million.³⁷ It earned more than 100 industry accolades, having passed 600,000 copies sold and 100 accolades by January 2015.³ The studio framed the game’s success as vindication after the pressure of following Bastion, whose reputation had grown with time.²