Exclusive Interview with the Producers of Reverse: 1999 | How Was the Gacha Game with the Best Taste Gambled into Existence?
Intro
Players worry Reverse: 1999 has gotten more commercial after two things: the first offline concert, A Night of Euphony (Shanghai, early Oct), and the first 6-star SP limited character, Huntsworn Lilya (v4.0). Some read the concert as accelerated monetization, some read SP characters as selling old characters again, and the speculation that "Reverse: 1999 is getting less and less Reverse: 1999-flavored" has never stopped.
Hitako (Producer) and Guest Cat (Art Director) say that since the project began, Reverse: 1999 has only wanted to do one thing: "make a different gacha game." They say Bluepoch has never wanted to be a team that goes with the flow: "Bluepoch is a company with idealism and a creator-first mindset... No one can overturn the era, but at least we can choose to keep our original intention."
The interviewer says he couldn't dig out any "little trick to make Reverse: 1999 sell well," only talk of arcanum, literary quality, drama, and tension. He says Reverse: 1999's unique taste may come from this group not wanting to live as "the game industry's standard answer."
01. Wanting to make a different gacha game
Hitako studied finance because family said it makes money, but disliked the formal wear, networking, and socializing. Guest Cat studied environmental design for the same reason and spent school drawing anime characters. Both did fan art, then ended up in gacha.
Hitako drew fan art in college and played everything from Chain Chronicle and Million Arthur up to the popular domestic gacha games that followed. Since few companies did campus recruiting for games, Hitako never thought of working in games until a campus recruitment showed up. They only applied to Guangzhou companies and started as a systems designer.
Guest Cat says gacha was booming back then, with games like Touken Ranbu and Kantai Collection hot. Someone saw their fan art and asked them to draw game character art, so they gained game art experience while still in school. After graduating they worked as a comic assistant and game art outsourcer, then joined a gacha project.
Hitako started on a stats-heavy card game, where even the writers had to do systems work, and disliked it, thinking a game should at least build a world. Guest Cat says most gacha games the market recognizes are full of the creators' passion and love.
They left to make Reverse: 1999 because they wanted something different. Military sci-fi was dominant at the time, and their art keywords were arcanum and bizarre. They figured it would have an audience and at least wouldn't die, but didn't do a rigorous market analysis. It was just passion, so they made it. Nobody knew how it would turn out.
The interviewer calls it a bit of a gamble, and Guest Cat says courage gets rarer as you age and own more, since you fear losing what you have.
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Hitako was producer from the start, their first time. They were picked because they're a systems designer who isn't stats-driven. Gacha needs systems designers who understand art and writing, to express the world and build emotional links between players and characters, and that kind of designer wouldn't survive in a traditional stats card game.
Their work now: Hitako and Guest Cat supervise and control overall progress, but sometimes dive into creation. Guest Cat goes deeper and wider than a usual art director, since art is Reverse: 1999's key function and constant inspiration needs someone with artistic taste. Guest Cat also handles collisions between pipelines, which taught them about the boundary of business and art.
Vertin and Arcana (early characters) were designed by Guest Cat as lead artist, before moving up to Art Director and into supervising.
02. A gacha game can't stay restrained forever
On the claim that the flavor changed: Hitako says Reverse: 1999 is too new. Mainstream gacha is fairly mature, but Reverse: 1999's style differs, so people understand it from different angles (retro, British, etc.). Everyone already has their own answer to "What is Reverse: 1999's flavor?"
Guest Cat says internal beta stressed the modern British look and at launch they confirmed their label as era retro, but the world is very large (ancient to modern, even aliens). Charlie is a 19th-century theater troupe leader, and A Knight is a medieval knight, not even modern.
Design standard: characters must show era culture. Low-fantasy characters who "walked out of history" are up to 80% era traits, highly fantastical ones (e.g. from outer space) less, but never zero. Players sometimes think designs are made up, when the era traits chosen are just niche and hard to recognize.
Huntsworn Lilya example: they took Valkyrie elements from the Collective Consciousness of the Flying Witches arriving in the story, a classic witch-hat silhouette on the winged crown, and a slim pilot uniform from real life so Lilya has both officer and flying witch traits.
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For the retro-but-modern look, they referenced 1920s antique cars and industrial design for Lilya's flight vehicle. Someone unfamiliar with antique cars may not recognize the era trait.
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Also, from project start until now, they've been paying more attention to widening tension in the art. Hitako says different scenes have different tension, and "Draw the sword! Big explosion!" definitely has more than a restrained iconic scene. Before, their principle leaned toward restrained visual language, so early poses were restrained.
Hitako says a gacha game can't stay restrained forever, especially now when attention is scarce and the market doesn't have the patience to analyze subtle content. They want to adapt to the era while keeping their uniqueness, widening tension gradually.
For Huntsworn Lilya's Ultimate they used frame-by-frame animation for the first time, since Lilya is set as a high-speed flyer, and to break their original production framework so players feel something different.
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On SP characters (first SP was Silverwing Eagle at the 3rd anniversary, now first 6-star SP limited Huntsworn Lilya): Hitako says a gacha IP can only hold so many new characters and factions, but the story must keep being written, so the best way is returning to old characters. First, strengthening old characters makes team building more interesting. Second, players already have an emotional link with old characters, and they keep growing in the story.
Hitako says it isn't universal but is common in film and anime IPs, like Marvel's multiverse (the same cast in different universes for richer characters, which Hitako sees as a kind of SP-ification), and One Piece (the crew meets new enemies and friends, while old friends and old enemies like Buggy also grow). Hitako likes that much better than "constantly meeting new people while the old characters sink into the past."
How they keep her Lilya: they follow the story progress. After the battlefield of 3.3's "The Campaign's Tale", she's no longer an ordinary soldier but starts to carry bigger responsibility, so v4.0 SP complements her growth. In the PV, the old Lilya gives a thumbs up to the SP Lilya who surpassed her. Past self approving present self is not replacement but a mark of growth.
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03. Imperfect drama
Hitako says in story design they never want to fall into the formulaic template of "over-focusing on promoting characters." Characters are gacha's core commercial resource, but over-focusing on promoting them can backfire, since in that flow the story has to yield to the character. They give a lot of weight to the story itself and keep some literary quality.
Literary quality can't be defined, it's a feeling and not a hard rule. Hitako's example: before a Hollywood popcorn action film you can guess hero and villain will fight and it'll be spectacular, and popcorn films deliver the expected thrill. But with arthouse or non-formula films, even after the trailer you couldn't guess what the story is. They want players to feel after Reverse: 1999's story that they've watched an expectation-breaking, emotionally resonant, memorable film.
[TL Note: A popcorn movie is a popular, entertaining film meant for casual viewing rather than deep philosophical or artistic analysis.]
Asked if popcorn design is lower, Hitako says design has no high or low. Popcorn gives the expected thrill with direct emotional feedback, and fast-paced story with lots of fun is a great design and suits fast-paced life. They just want to keep freshness, so they don't want to follow the mainstream. If a story's form of moving you is easy to guess, can they design something against the formula to make people feel it's "not just this"?
v4.0's theme is the free will of people. Facing an ancient, overwhelming force, Lilya keeps her self and holds on to her will. Drake, injected with Mordred's will, chooses to rebel against the imposed fate.
Drake smashes the round table, refusing to be Mordred.
Early promo made some players think they'd go big on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but that was just a dream of old knightly spirit packaged by Manus Vindictae. The dream shatters and we face ourselves and the real. Even in the era shifting under the storm, holding to your heart and seeking yourself still has meaning. It may be heavy compared to fast-paced fun, but they think it might resonate with today's audience.
Asked how to balance without being too stiff or pretentious, Guest Cat says literary quality and colloquial feel are two things. A street-born character should talk streetwise, not be stiff. Lilya is from Russia, so her word choice and behavior (like drinking) are bold, and Huntsworn Lilya after growth keeps that style because it's her trait.
They also don't write characters and stories too far from everyday life, since humans share emotions across eras. Kindness, courage, even a villain's stubbornness are common feelings in ordinary people.
Guest Cat's example is the 1.7 main story: after Marcus blames all her pain and mistakes on herself, Hofmann tells her, "Trying to be responsible for everything beyond one's capability is a symbol of irrational hubris." That line left an impression and reminds Guest Cat of their own attitude at work.
Another is v3.3's very real character experiences: after villages in the Don fall into war, many residents refuse to flee and choose to stay, and some join the cavalry corps to defend their homeland. Under war it isn't only blood and fire but warmth between people.
Commander Ivan, amid the era shift caused by the Storm, meets Ms. Galina who looks almost identical to his late mother and so reunites with a "mother" in disguise. Igor, to find his men another way out, betrays the organization, which causes new sacrifices, and he admits it's his sin and won't deny or avoid it.
Hitako adds that at the level of organizations and factions, war is about different interests and motives, but for the people in it it's separation and reunion within families, insiders' tangled feelings, and guilt after wrong choices. These are the feelings of specific people.
Interviewer says some argue that when the story's stage is big and about organizations and powers, details of departments and individuals don't matter, yet they still grab those details. Hitako says without details the story is simpler: there's a country, and this country has a king; because he went through some kind of life hardship he fell into self-pity; you come to his side and help him solve the hardship; after he awakens he splits the world with one slash, and everyone lives a beautiful, happy life. A "Righteous Magistrate"-style power-fantasy plot doesn't need many details and is easy to write, but it's also formulaic.
Interviewer says many literary books explain how power structures formed through tugging, but many games do it more simply. Hitako says at launch the main story discussed power and politics, and some players said it had British/American drama flavor, because they were really writing power struggles, not simple attribution or comparing whose blade is faster or whose position is higher.
And there's no "Righteous Magistrate" in Reverse: 1999, no perfect, super-important figure who's strong, high-status, and decisive all at once. They like writing imperfect characters because it's closer to life. How could life go smoothly all the time?
Examples: Lucy (1.9 main story) broke the spell but paid with memory damage. 37 is a math genius who knows the world through numbers but isn't good at understanding or empathizing with specific people. Huntsworn Lilya (v4.0), after the Flying Witches' trial, seems to have gained divine power, but actually has to fight those consciousnesses every moment, and if she slacks or fails she'll be consumed. Her growth is also tied to a confrontation with Veronica (her former superior), so her growth itself comes with separation and danger.
Interviewer asks if that will be criticized as literary-youth syndrome, angst for angst' sake. Hitako says the point isn't to write the story as miserable, the core is presenting an imperfect sense of drama. Their example is Oppenheimer, which shoots the guilt in the heart of the father of the atomic bomb and the doubts about whether he gave bomb technology to the Soviets. A mainstream view wouldn't shoot it so, since male protagonists are supposed to be strong, mighty, and leaders. By contrast, the male fragility Oppenheimer shows is an imperfect sense of drama.
Likewise in Reverse: 1999, some characters get what they want and also lose a lot.
04. Not wanting to make something too highbrow
Interviewer asks if after 3+ years it's hard to keep finding something different. Hitako says it's getting harder, but their track is truly a bit unusual, and even in parts that look like the mainstream they want a different feel.
Lunar New Year example: they wanted authentically Chinese culture, so this year's Spring Unending is xianxia, but not xianxia in the broad sense. Aesthetically it pays tribute to King Hu's wuxia films and fuses classic Chinese aesthetics.
Music example: v1.8 is based on the Soviet era, which makes many think of Slavic folk first, but they added post-punk to the version's music, a more niche choice. The 3.0 EP of the same name has no lyrics and isn't a regular EP, but fits that version's war theme better.
Since launch, their drive to "make something different" hasn't changed, and they'll keep going at their own pace.
Interviewer says community controversy has grown. Hitako says since they didn't consider the market much at launch, the market and player base complexity today is beyond the team's expectation, and they can't find a common denominator that satisfies everyone. Reverse: 1999's audience includes content-focused gacha users, competitive and casual game players, and many who never touched gacha or are new to games. Everyone likes different things and sees each one differently.
And as said, Reverse: 1999 is too new, not built on a mature gacha style but on their own life experience.
Asked if they feel wronged, Guest Cat says once your creation goes to the public it's no longer yours, and everyone has the right to interpret. Hitako says they listen to feedback but can't lose their creative spirit and idealism because of it.
How they keep that spirit: Hitako says first the company atmosphere. The boss (Zhou) is a Chinese literature major with an idealistic streak. As boss he must read the market and care about revenue, but also wants to make a purer good game, and has said his ultimate wish is a product like Red Dead Redemption. Second, they still care about team members' taste. When interviewing newcomers they still ask what they usually watch, and if you apply as a writer but only watch one type of popcorn movie, it may not suit (not bad, just too single).
Guest Cat likes Twin Peaks, cult films, and Yoshihiro Togashi's works.
Hitako likes Tatsuki Fujimoto's works, most of all Fire Punch and Goodbye, Eri.
Guest Cat adds to also look at masters regularly. At the Borghese Gallery they saw master sculptures and were shocked, asking how he could carve marble so lifelike. They stayed a long time observing the master's control of the human body, materials, and folds.
Sometimes Guest Cat also references masters' creative expression. The Storm in v3.7 actually references the style of Anselm Kiefer (German painter), e.g. 《Wohin wir uns wenden im Gewitter der Rosen ist die Nacht mit Dornen erhellt》 (In the storm of roses, wherever we turn, the night is lit by thorns). Most of Kiefer's works relate to war, and this painting is no exception: he bent iron wire and arranged it on the canvas, and the red paint and the hair-embroidered barbed wire in the painting form roses and thorns, also presenting war's cruelty.
In the early main story, there's a scene where young Vertin sees other classmates disintegrate in the storm. They thought Neo-Constructivism fit, hence the shot of "classmates breaking down into geometric bodies," with one geometric body rolling to Vertin's feet.
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Interviewer says without the explanation he wouldn't have understood the Kiefer painting and asks how they balance taste and the barrier to understanding. Guest Cat says they don't want to make something too highbrow and hope more readers can understand their story and expression.
Hitako says they value being on the same wavelength when hiring, but Reverse: 1999 is first a gacha game, and team members must be gacha players who know where the boundary of gacha is. On balancing readability and creator mindset, they're still learning.
Some earlier versions weren't easy to understand, like v2.6 (Folie et Déraison, a tribute to 20th-century Latin American literature). They can't ask every player to read Borges from exactly the same angle as them, since after all "in the eyes of a thousand people there are a thousand Hamlets."
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Hitako says they used to have more of a creator mindset and always wanted to polish content to 100, but a 100 in your head meeting reality may land at 60. Now they think earlier about landing, which gives more chance at 80. That's the team's most obvious growth over the years.
Interviewer asks a somewhat sharp question: over the years people keep saying Reverse: 1999 isn't fun to play. Hitako says they weren't good enough before, but never gave up and keep trying, since making something fun or not fun first helps find the next direction for gameplay.
Again, they can't find a common denominator for all players, and at gameplay level they think it's not good to chase one either, since player types are diverse and chasing a common denominator would hurt fun and freshness. They also know a single traditional gameplay type may not suit their players, so they keep exploring more gameplay types to serve different players.
Asked about bottlenecks: different game types need different resource input. In a traditional stats card game, gameplay mostly relies on stats and systems, but a gacha game's new gameplay also needs a synchronized package of background art, UI, story, and concept, so the development pipeline isn't short and involves multi-department coordination, with writing and art deeply involved.
Asked if gameplay is really necessary (some think side modes only need to let players read story and the levels don't matter): Hitako says as both a producer and a player they think gameplay is necessary. A gacha game is still a game, and gameplay is part of it, with different emphasis by game type. From outside, Reverse: 1999 may look writing and art focused, but that doesn't mean they don't value gameplay.
In their view gameplay is an extension of the world. v3.9 (Rekindled! Games of the Summer-Gold Sea) is a story of an ancient-Greek-style sports festival, so they built a "Dolphin Riding" race mini-game so players feel the story immersively, and feedback has been good. Big modes like The Syndrome of Silence and Pre-Storm Protocol fill in the story and world while also trying to give players fun in stats and battle.
So despite development pressure, they actively make gameplay.
05. No one can overturn the era, but we can choose to keep our original intention
Happiest moments: Guest Cat says seeing player fan art, since they used to draw it and know fan art only exists where there's love. A player once mailed Factory Head (Reverse: 1999's content lead) a character sand coaster they made. Factory Head kept Schneider's, and Guest Cat took Vertin's and keeps it at home. Seeing your creation loved and connecting with players makes them happy.
They also love new merch: the merch producer (快乐小狗) comes in with a big pile of stuff every time, saying "Look!" and everyone goes "Wow~" and gathers around waiting for her to hand out merch.
Hitako loves odd merch, especially this year's setting book, and says that next life they'll make merch. They also love offline events, which feel like the IP branching out. Their deepest memory is 2023, when Reverse: 1999 first attended a convention at Poly World Trade Expo in Guangzhou and the line wrapped around twice. It couldn't compare to the truly explosive gacha lines then, but exceeded their expectation.
On the concert, A Night of Euphony: Hitako says music has always been one of Reverse: 1999's signature contents, and their music label The 1999 has made many memorable works, e.g. Goodbye, which many players love and has done well at home and abroad. Over the years surveys often showed players asking when Reverse: 1999 would hold a concert, wanting the atmosphere of a live event beyond the screen. The idea came naturally.
Honestly it's also a new challenge, since they'd never held an offline event in a venue this large, but gathering this many players who love Reverse: 1999 is meaningful in itself.
Asked if they fear being accused of following the trend (many gacha games hold concerts), Hitako says in-game and out of game they pursue something different. In merch, they make the basic, mature-pipeline badges and acrylic stands, but also creative products like the Equilibrium Umbrella and the power bank that works as a pager.
(The LED lights recreate the glowing spell patterns inside the umbrella in game. Image credit: Bilibili.) Same with the concert: beyond regular music plus dance, they made modules of various music forms, singers, dance, story performance, large props, and light shows, hoping to restore Reverse: 1999 IP's aesthetic in visuals, music, and narrative as much as possible.
Prep goes back to the first half of 2025.
Challenge 1: which songs best represent Reverse: 1999, and which stories do players most want to see live? Over the years Reverse: 1999 has gone through many eras and stories, and music is one of the most direct carriers of those memories. Regulus's retro rock takes people back to the British era, symphonic and operatic texture shows Isolde's splendor and tragedy, and there's Rayashki, the singing of people holding on in the ice and snow. They discussed song selection and arrangement for a long time and revised multiple versions, considering the link between program order and emotional flow, and finally designed the concert in chapters.
Challenge 2: re-arranging music and sound. Many songs were adapted live for stronger dynamics and impact than the studio, covering folk instruments, rock band, symphony orchestra, and electronic music. They had the symphony orchestra and rock band talk, had electronic timbre clash with folk instruments, and added bigger vocal harmony arrangements to some songs' climaxes for more shock.
Challenge 3: stage visuals. They had to convert players' iconic scenes from phone size to screens dozens of meters high, and arrange the screen, lights, and central-controlled light sticks together to present the Night of Euphony players imagine.
Guest Cat says they wanted to polish stage effects. For The Doors, they specially made a batch of the glass jar that traps Isolde and really smashed one at every rehearsal to tune the best stage effect.
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On the commercial flavor getting heavier: Hitako says as said, SP characters consider the story's development, and as for making money, the concert isn't cost-effective. They felt that for the IP's long-term development and to give players more experiences, these things should be done.
Hitako says being called "commercial" makes them a little sad, but it was expected. Players now see through the developers' playbook better than before, and they understand that some games' version strategies exist to promote characters and boost the numbers. So communication between the game and its players has become more complicated than it used to be.
Interviewer says players didn't use to rank games by version revenue. Guest Cat says that's tied to the era: people's energy is scarcer and they care more about content value, so they now look at revenue to judge whether the game they play is alive and still worth investing in.
Interviewer asks about their revenue data, and whether they need it to "prove your innocence." Hitako says they don't need to prove it with data, but they're doing okay. If they were dirt poor, why do a concert, which is low value and makes little money? Doing these under pressure is itself proof they still have creator ideals and confidence.
Most painful time: Hitako says before launch, with heavy public opinion, losing sleep from worry, afraid the game would die at any moment. Even now the sense of crisis hasn't stopped. At launch they worried whether this kid could be born, and now they worry whether the kid can grow up healthy.
Hitako says from outside, games now look like a profitable, face-saving line, and some people enter just for money. But game development isn't as beautiful as imagined and is still a heavy industrial setting, so you need passion to bear this much pressure and keep going.
On the future, Hitako hopes outsiders stop seeing them as a "small-time" company. Now people may think Bluepoch only has strengths in content, and still doubt its tech and gameplay design level, but they have ambition and will fill those gaps.
They also hope developers and players become happier, because the whole gacha market now seems not very happy. They think a game should be purer. The era is changing: "No one can overturn the era, but at least we can choose to keep our original intention."
