On November 13, 2015, a highly coordinated terrorist attack wrought havoc across Paris, France. In just one hour, terrorists struck several locations, including the Stage de France and the Bataclan theatre with suicide bombings and mass shootings. 130 people were killed in the attacks. Seven attackers also died and the suspected mastermind behind the tragedy was killed five days later in a raid.
At the same time, French indie game developer Christophe Galati was hard at work on his debut game Save me Mr. Tako! He started development the year prior in what was the 25th anniversary of the Game Boy. He had big ideas for it, but as he was a student as Isart Digital, Galati decided to start small and develop the game as an endless runner. After receiving positive feedback on his design, he returned to his original concept and began working on the title as a full-blown platform adventure game. He would end up devoting all of his free time to the development of Save me Mr. Tako!
Galati was already putting a lot of his hopes and fears into the story of the game, crafting a tale about tolerance and fighting for a better world. Creating games had been a coping mechanism for him since he was 12, and after the attacks in Paris, he’d use Mr. Tako! to express his feelings about the world around him.
“I lived in Paris during the attacks, and Tako-San absorbed a lot of my fears and concerns about the world we live in,” Galati explained. “I was designing the human city Sarona when it happened, so the tone of the game shifted at this point, it started to reference ideas like obscurantism and it became even more personal for me. The game is not only about the war between octopus and humans, but also the concept that humans are divided into kingdoms that are at war with each other, too. It’s not about finding out who the bad guy is, but more about how uniting and accepting people’s differences can make the world a better place. My goal was to create a universe and characters that will resonate with players, and perhaps help them overcome their struggles so they can live their own great adventure.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, Parisians came together to comfort one another. They opened their homes to people who were too scared to return to theirs. Campaigning for an upcoming election stopped temporarily. French flags flew off store shelves and thousands of people submitted applications to join the French Army.
Source: Destructoid How a terrorist attack influenced the world of Save me Mr. Tako!