‘Hyenas’ players will have to fight over Wham! CDs and Rick Astley

Creative Assembly‘s Hyenas, a colourful and cheeky extraction shooter, has players fighting tooth and nail for the privilege of being Rick-Rolled in a dystopian future.

In the year that Hyenas is set, the Earth has been ravaged by a disaster called The Crack, caused by the failure of an anti-gravity engine that created a singularity and tore the planet to threads. Only a fraction of humanity survives, with billionaires watching on from their terraformed haven on Mars.

In spite of their safety and security, the billionaires are bored with a society devoid of stratification. Their focus turns to The Brand, a new concept that replaced politics, art and religion in the pursuit of rare “Broke Earth” artefacts.

A company called CLOUT then capitalised on this and created Plunderships that travel to Earth and gather retro consumer Merch like clothing, media, electronics, and more to sell to the highest bidder. However, pirates attack the Plunderships for their loot to “steal back treasures, reclaim the past and stick a prime middle finger to their supposed betters”. These are the Hyenas.

“I’ll be honest, over the course of the last year, I’ve changed my perspective on it,” said product director Alex Hunnisett in an interview with NME. “I started off very much going, ‘We’re sticking it to them!’ Then I thought, ‘No, we’re just fighting over ridiculous stuff.’ And I love the irreverence and the joy of that.”

The team used the scene from Zombieland where one of the characters obsessively searches for Twinkies in the apocalypse as an inspiration. “We’re not going to be fighting over a diamond,” he explained, listing things like the last issues of a comic book or a Wham! CD.

“Oh yeah,” he laughed when we asked if there really was a Wham! CD in Hyenas. “Well, my favourite one – we’ve seen it happen a couple of times in the booth, because you don’t know what’s going to be in the hold, we may or may not have managed to get ‘Never Gonna Give You Up‘.”

“There’s an entire catalogue [of music],” continued Hunnisett. “It’s again when you go back to that, ‘what’s your last Twinkie’, you have that conversation internally as a starting point before we also scale up and work with our players.”

“We were fortunate enough to manage to get quite a lot of them into the game, so there’s plenty of music across many generations,” he concluded.

In other news, Hyenas‘ closed beta is scheduled from August 31 to September 1 with eight unique heroes to get to grips with.