EXCLUSIVE: Akupara Games brings Dead Pets Unleashed back to life
Akupara Games has announced the revitalization of punk rock feminist adventure Dead Pets Unleashed. With a name like Dead Pets Unleashed, it feels almost ironic that this upcoming indie life-sim has itself been brought back from the dead.
More than just another indie title, Dead Pets Unleashed’s resurrection is a testament to resilience in queer creative spaces. Originally developed under Triple Topping, the game met an untimely demise when the studio closed its doors in 2023. Now, LA-based indie publisher Akupara Games has acquired the entire Triple Topping catalogue and is bringing Dead Pets Unleashed out of the grave and into the hands of players around the world.
Dead Pets Unleashed puts the player right into the shoes of our main protagonist, Gordy, a 30-something demon. Throughout her journey, Gordy will have to navigate her world by balancing her underground punk rock band, Dead Pets, with the ever present fear of barely making ends meet. The game mixes mini-games, slice-of-life dialogue, and an infectious punk rock soundtrack.
I got the chance to chat with Inna Hansen, Art Director and Concept Artist at Triple Topping, and Buddy Sola, Head of Marketing at Akupara Games, about this revival:
CAP: For our readers who are hearing about Dead Pets Unleashed for the first time, how would you describe it in a single sentence?
Inna: An unfiltered game about everyday life, demons and punk, filled with bespoke handcrafted art and music.
The game follows Gordy, a 30-year-old demon trying to make her punk rock dreams come true. What inspired Gordy’s story, and why was it important for you to tell a story about chasing a creative dream in your 30s?
Inna: It is a coming of age story of sorts. In your twenties everything is possible, but in your thirties all things feel like the final choice. Chasing the dream for a decade can wear down most people. This is a story of a band giving one last shot. Being well into adulthood you have had the time to work on your craft. At the same time there is the feeling of the thing that originally fired you up slowly fading. Like what made you fall in love with this dream in the first place? Being in any creative industry a lot of people can relate to feeling like they don’t have their shit together even in their thirties. Then life often gets in the way, priorities shift. It’s the feeling of “I’m getting too old for this shit…”, you know? That being said, I don’t think I’ll ever get too old for this shit hahaha!
The game blends slice-of-life management with narrative choices and mini-games. How do these gameplay elements work together to tell Gordy’s story and explore its LGBTQ+ themes?
Inna: Life is a messy mix of so many things. It’s finding rent, washing your vibrator, falling in love, meeting your friends, serving burgers or playing with the band. We always wanted the game to land the emotional impact first and foremost. All the mechanics and mini-games emphasize what Gordy is going through. We wrote many LGBTQ+ characters, which reflects the team. Gordy herself is pansexual and is uninhibited about her sexuality. We wanted to talk freely about all that stuff in a way that just felt like a part of life, and a part of the game. The ‘washing the vibrator’ mini-game for instance is just a silly thing we thought was funny and a weird little interaction. But it tells you something about Gordy as someone who takes care of herself and keeps that stuff hygienic, you know.
After your studio had to close its doors, you went through a challenge that many indie developers can relate to. What was that period like for you, and what did you imagine the future of Dead Pets Unleashed might be at the time?
Inna: I’ve been on a lot of canceled projects before and it absolutely sucks. You pour years of your life into this thing that just never sees the light of day. Which makes me never quite let my guard down. With Dead Pets I could see the finish line so clearly. It was brutal to step away from the project so late in the production.
Why was it essential for this story to be explicitly queer? What do you hope players, particularly those in the LGBTQ+ community, take away from their time with Gordy and her band?
Inna: We are a pretty diverse, largely queer team and so it represents us well. We wanted queer players to feel as at home playing the game as we felt making it. It’s just being free to express something that is our own culture and what feels natural. From a game dev point of view it’s the little interactions with team members and play testers that really made it feel important to be explicit. I remember designing a little ‘Protect trans kids!’ poster to hang in an environment somewhere, and getting a heartfelt «thank you, this is so touching» from a team mate. I know there is a lot of debate around representation and its function etc, but this stuff feels meaningful to me as a creator and us as a team. We wanted the game to be actually punk, not just aesthetically. To me that means radical compassion and embracing otherness in its truest form.
Buddy, what was it about Dead Pets Unleashed that caught your eye and made you decide this was a project that absolutely needed to be saved?
Buddy: The magic of indies comes with individuals. Lived experience. The kinds of unique viewpoints that come out when only a handful of artists touch a project. I have a lot of respect for AAA games and I got my start in AAA, don’t get me wrong! But when you make a game with 500 people, it doesn’t feel as handcrafted as making a game with five. Dead Pets has that handcrafted feel, tells a story from a deeply unique, personal perspective and offers up the kind of unique experience that we want to have in the Akupara catalogue.
What does this new partnership mean for the game? Has the original vision changed at all, or has this new support allowed you to fully realize it?
Buddy: There’s a certain kind of support that a publisher brings to any project. Localization, marketing support, all that. But for the core development of the game, we’re actually focusing on beefing up some of the game’s core mechanics. We have a big catalogue of games and we’re bringing music from other titles into Dead Pets’ rhythm game in order to add more options for players. And a big focus is art, too, adding in new ways that players can express themselves in their play through. We’re touching the other stuff a bit, too. Writing, design, a few other features, but the core experience of Dead Pets will remain exactly the same. Gordy getting the band back together, struggling with what it might mean to make it big. Lots of fleshing things out around that core.
Inna: Honestly I initially didn’t know what to think of the game’s future. And so I needed to give it up in my head, move on and let it be buried. Amazingly the folks at Akupara came through and wanted to actually finish the project! I’m still in disbelief that they are bringing Dead Pets back from the dead. Does it make it Undead Pets? They have been collaborating and checking in with the original team to make sure the game gets released as intended. It has been a great experience so far.
Buddy, as a publisher, what is the business case for championing a game with unapologetic queer and punk themes? Why is this audience important to you?
Buddy: Candidly, this is not the kind of business decision that executives at other companies would probably make. But in a certain sense, that’s the point. Akupara is an unapologetically queer company and we’ve signed other unapologetically queer games in the past because it’s who we are and it’s an audience we care about. More than that, it’s specifically an audience that other publishers don’t care about. Really, that’s the business case for something like Dead Pets and our queer focus in general: When everybody else leaves people like us behind, that creates an audience we want to provide for.
Some publishers might shy away from niche titles. What gives Akupara the confidence to invest in and market a game like Dead Pets Unleashed to a global audience?
Buddy: The business of indie game publishing has moved insanely fast in an insanely short amount of time. Nine years ago, Akupara was founded in a landscape where the entire business was three times smaller than it is today, in terms of games released on Steam. And yet, there are more players on Steam than ever before. I’m sure a lot of them are there to play Helldivers 2 and Battlefield 6, but plenty are there to play games like Dead Pets. Just like plenty were there to play Cryptmaster, Sorry We’re Closed, and The Darkside Detective. If we could turn those games into million dollar titles, we absolutely have the expertise to do it with Dead Pets.
At its core, Dead Pets Unleashed isn’t just a game about chasing music dreams, it’s about queer resilience, radical compassion, and finding a home in spaces others leave behind. In that sense, it’s more than a comeback; it’s a statement.
Wishlist and play the Dead Pets Unleashed demo now on Steam!
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