Interview: Knockout City Developers On Embracing Queerness
“Knockout City’s aesthetics are designed to be loud and expressive with a ton of attitude,” says game director Jeremy Russo. “That gave us extreme amounts of flexibility to fully represent a wide variety of identities and cultures within the game. Because so much is built around style and showing off, players can be super proud to represent those identities and cultures. Together with our unique approach to our customisation system, we truly wanted to allow players to be who they wanted to be and shout it from the rooftops.”
Knockout City isn’t like a lot of other multiplayer games out there right now—you aren’t given a list of pre-written and designed characters but rather a character creator, letting you embrace your own sense of self. Any cosmetic goes with any body type, any hairstyle, and any skin tone, letting you be you. And that intrinsic tie to the loud and bombastic punk flair has made Knockout City a queer haven, something the devs have consciously woven into the design.
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“The Knockout City team is diverse and passionate about these topics,” Russo tells me. “For most of these cosmetics, we source ideas and feedback from the queer community within the studio to ensure they are authentic, representative, and aspirational. Sometimes, we’ve also contracted members of our community to create special assets, and that’s something we’d like to continue doing in the future. We think this approach is especially important when our own team members aren’t members of the community the asset is representing. We want to get it right, and often the best person to judge that is a member of the community itself.”
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