You might not know it, but many games are made in Toronto. On the AAA side, you have such heavy hitters as the Ubisoft Toronto co-developed Star Wars Outlaws and Behaviour Interactive’s Dead by Daylight, while locally-made indie gems include Drinkbox’s Guacamelee! and Mighty Yell’s The Big Con. And yet, we seldom see the Canadian city actually depicted in games.
There are some examples of this, like Visai Games’ Venba, which focuses on an Indo-Canadian mother, or Ubisoft Montreal’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, which follows the titular Toronto musician’s battle against his girlfriend’s seven evil exes. But on the whole, Toronto itself is sorely underrepresented in gaming.
That’s what makes Retroronto so notable. Hailing from Toronto animator and game developer Sean Browning, it’s an arcade-style life simulator for PC set in a pixellated recreation of the city. It builds on a surprisingly prolific career for the young creator, who went to George Brown for game art and animation following an internship at a now-defunct Facebook game studio called Social Game Universe. He’s since had stints in VFX, animation, e-learning, and even Q&A at Ubisoft.
“My history has always been a little all over the place, and I’m kind of now in this indie game dev chapter of my life,” says Browning.
It’s a chapter that began in earnest in 2017 during his post-grad when he made a game called Tram-Panic based on the TTC. Around that time, the Toronto band Anyway Gang was working on its song “Big Night,” and, after coming across Tram-Panic, tapped Browning to make retro-inspired overworld art of the city for the accompanying music video. From there, Browning thought it would be fun to build on what he’d done for “Big Night” in a full game.
“It just became this hobby project that I was just kind of playing around for fun a little bit later into the pandemic,” he says. But eventually, he was laid off from his job as a full-time animator, leading him to seriously consider game development. With the encouragement of fellow Torontonian Jordan Sparks, a game developer who co-runs the charitable Playing With Posters initiative, Browning began actively developing Retroronto in 2024 under the name Starspray Studios after securing Ontario Creates funding.
As he got to work, he kept thinking about the lack of representation for Toronto itself in games.
“When I did research on other city sims or life sims and such, it’s easy enough to just make a very generic city, but cities are full of character and stories and history — stuff that’s worth talking about,” he says. “And I think a lot of games that take place in cities, especially in North America, are generally, ‘It’s New York, but not,’ or LA, or whatever else. [But] Toronto is never a centrepiece locale in these games.”
He notes that Canada’s little representation in games usually comes in the background, like the opening of Swedish developer Frictional’s horror game Soma being set in Toronto or American studio Obsidian’s South Park: The Stick of Truth having a level based on the Great White North. Perhaps the most prominent example of this comes from Ubisoft Montreal’s aforementioned Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game. In that case, at least, it was an actual Canadian developer making a game that was quintessentially about Toronto, but even then, it was drawing from Canadian Bryan Lee O’Malley’s popular graphic novels and Edgar Wright’s film adaptation.
Browning says he was inspired by Scott Pilgrim but wanted to take more of an educational approach. “I don’t think a lot of games do that, where you get to learn about a city. There’s no ‘virtual tourism,’ if you will, about that,” he says.
“And so one of my marketing buzzwords there is, ‘Let’s make this little game that is set in Toronto, but doesn’t just have it be a setting and mean nothing and just be this big empty space that you can just exist in. Maybe we can learn more about it.’ And I feel like there’s something there, especially for [that] underrepresentation in Canadian games. Let’s represent these cities!”
Of course, that representation manifests in different ways, especially given Toronto’s multiculturalism, and it’s something Browning hopes to capture in Retroronto.
“I like to tell people about Toronto, of course, but also about city living in general. I talk to a lot of people who have come to Toronto for schooling or even to just start fresh, to make a new life for themselves. And I think there’s something really inspiring that Toronto can kind of give that. Maybe it’s ‘the Canadian Dream,’ if you will. And I feel like that’s worth trying to make a game around.”
That’s where the life sim elements come into play. As a newcomer to Toronto, you’ll have to get a job and manage your finances while exploring the city and becoming friends with its residents. The more you play, the more you’ll unlock better jobs and other areas to discover.
“Let’s talk about younger people that are trying to come here and make a mark for themselves and try to get by and grow here. Even doing research about the city, especially in the setting I’m trying to set it in, like the mid-2000s and such — the city was going through its own changes. Even now, it still is,” says Browning of this premise. “There’s a theme going on here that I feel like I can really grasp onto. And so it’s really a mix of these things — of the city growing and people growing with it, and how that’s affecting people.”
Throughout all of this, though, Browning still refers to the game a “cautious love letter” to Toronto, as he’s taking care to not depict the city as some utopian metropolis. He says it was important to him to explore issues like expensive housing and high levels of traffic.
“I don’t want to make some game that lauds Toronto as the beacon of ‘everything is awesome.’ I think there’s already that stereotype that Torontonians think they’re the centre of the universe.’ I really want to work against that stereotype,” he says. “It’s something that I think will add a lot of character. It has its flaws. It has its problems. And I’m working to really try to add that, but also add the icing on the cake as well in regards to what’s really great about Toronto, but these are the problems that Toronto faces — [back] then as well as now.”
Clearly, Browning is working to capture the soul of Toronto, but of course, there will also be plenty of recognizable landmarks and other physical staples. As you play, you’ll be able to ride through the downtown core on TTC, coming across the likes of the CN Tower and Rogers Centre, City Hall, St. James Cathedral, the OCAD buildings, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Moss Park Armoury. Some areas, like the Eaton Centre, currently only have exteriors, but he says he’d love to add the ability to go into the iconic mall.
These locations will be at the centre of quests from NPCs who will ask you to help them find specific parts of the city, and completing these will reward you with descriptions about each of them. For instance, he says the game will explain the difference between the old and new city halls. But he also notes that development is still fluid and there are other things he’s considering including.
“There used to be a shirtless dude called Zanta. I literally just learned about this dude, I’d never seen him in person. People are always asking, ‘Are you going to have Olivia Chow? Are you going to have Rob Ford?’ And all these other characters. And I’m like, ‘Man, I’d love to!’” he says. “Even in the 2000s, in that garbage strike and all that stuff, that was the start of [Ford’s] rise. I learned around that time, Trump was trying to build Trump Tower. That could be an interesting angle of this antagonistic real estate developer coming in as part of this group of people trying to grow these condos and all this stuff in the city.”
But of course, Starspray is a tiny nascent studio, and so Browning can’t include all of this. Indeed, a crucial part of game development is managing scope, especially as an indie studio, and he credits fellow developers at local industry meetups for helping him figure all of that out.
“There’s so many opportunities and things I could do to reference Toronto and everything else and I’m just so busy trying to make this life sim portion work! So that’s still something I’m working on — characters and tiny little landmarks,” he says. “I’m trying to find the big sorts of references and once I keep developing, ‘here’s the tiny ones you can find between the cracks,’ and that’s been a lot fun to figure out.”
All in all, Browning says Retroronto presents an opportunity to play a unique role in the massive and ever-evolving Canadian gaming space.
“So much art and cool stuff comes from Canada. It’s only a matter of time now that it’s bled through where people are now trying to make games that are from or set in Canada,” he says. “And I just want to be a part of that movement. It’s something that I can be really proud of as a game developer here.”
Retroronto doesn’t yet have a release date, but you can wishlist the game on Steam. A short demo is also available on itch.io.
Image credit: Starspray Studios
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