The world is on the brink of collapse in El Pasoan indie game-maker Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s cult hit El Paso, Elsewhere. You play as James Savage also voiced by Nelson, and run through a motel in the border city killing monsters, searching for closure with a failed love, and try to stop the world from ending.
The game released on September 20th of 2023 for Xbox and PC, and now a year later Playstation players will have a chance to run through the Max Payne style shooter. Also adding to the hyper is that a Lakeith Stanfield fronted film adaptation is in the works.
Nelson has writing credits on huge projects, more notably of late like games such as South park: Snow Day!, and Stranger Things VR. These monumental releases from shows that are cultural landmarks only testify to the range that he shows in his writing.
This range comes to life in a game like El Paso, Elsewhere.
But before I picked up my Dualsense controllers and hopped into the vampire-riddled El Paso of the game, I spoke with the game creator and founder of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr. With a game release count growing and growing by the year, Nelson shows no signs of slowing down.
The day I spoke with him for this release, his newest game I Am Your Beast (which you can read a review for here) released on PC. The most fascinating thing about Xalavier and Strange Scaffold however, isn’t even the wide variety of writing credits or the ever growing list of releases, but his mentality around the game-making process.
I write this weeks after a huge company like Playstation celebrates the success of a game like Astrobot, a game celebrating a history of videogames classic wrought by their cutting edge stories and tech; but this also came tied with the mourning of a game like Concord, pushed back for years and years and was dead on arrival.
Strange Scaffold seems to navigate the formula behind successes and failures like these perfectly: namely, treating every game like a project built from love while focusing on healthy working conditions.
In the modern age where games are as varied as they are accessible, we see time and time again companies trying to cut corners or trim budgets, delay games, etc. etc. But Xalavier Nelson Jr. and Strange Scaffold are here to say that doesn’t have to happen. In this interview, we talked about being an El Pasoan and why the Sun City was the perfect setting for a game like this, sustainability in the videogame industry, and more.
This interview, conducted via Zoom, has been edited and cut for clarity. You can now purchase or download El Paso, Elsewhere wherever you buy videogames.
Antonio Villaseñor-Baca: Alrighty. Cool. So again, I want to thank you for your time and I want to start off by also saying congratulations on I Am Your Beast coming out today.
Xalavier Nelson Jr.: Thank you very much, It’s a very surreal time, to say the least. Someone on the team brought up, hey, it’s been less than a year since El Paso came out. So we had El Paso, Elsewhere and then Life Eater, Clickolding, and now this all in the last year. El Paso hits its one-year anniversary on September 26th. So it’s just deeply surreal.
I want to ask first, are you from El Paso? Are you currently in El Paso? Obviously, that’s a big element of the game. Can you tell me a little bit about where you’re from and your background?
I was a military brat. I’m not originally from El Paso, but about six years ago, my family came here, and as they moved on to their next duty location, I said, no, I’m setting down roots and staying. So I’ve set down my roots in El Paso. I’ve been here ever since. And I’m proud to consider El Paso my adopted hometown.
Awesome! Why El Paso? What made you want to stay?
It’s the first place that I’ve ever been that felt like home. I’ve traveled the world pretty much at this point, visiting nearly every continent, and the overwhelming feeling that I was struck with when I stepped off the plane into El Paso was this is home. It is a place that feels like, El Paso feels like a church built by God: someplace that is both sacred and loud all at the same time. It feels like a town where you can and should raise a family and be yourself in every way. I just have this deep connection to both El Paso; as far as the Southwest, I was born in Arizona as well. The cultural environment here, where you have this mixing of cultures and backgrounds and that being so rooted in El Paso experience, I love it and I love the people.
Love that. Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s always very unique to describe and talk about El Paso. How about with video games? How did you come to be part of this industry? Was this something that you grew up with?
My dad was a gamer, and one of the earliest pictures that exists of me—my family hasn’t been able to find it, but one of the earliest pictures I had laid my eyes on is me sitting on my dad’s lap with an unplugged controller in my hand, he had a controller in his hand. I think that he’s watching me play, and I’m transfixed by the screen, not just because video games are compelling but because from an early age, my family did feel that video games are art and are valid to be seen through an artistic lens. So, when I mentioned that I wanted to become a game developer of some kind growing up, at first, I wanted to be a beta tester. They thought that was a valid career path and they were excited to see me pursue my dreams. And as I’ve gone through this journey, beginning as a games journalist, going into game writing, then narrative design, then management and production, all these sorts of things to where now I run a studio. I’ve got right there in my corner, my biggest booster, my mom who reads every single article, watches every single video, and sends breakdowns and occasional threats to the group chat when a project gets a 7 out of 10.
Are [your parents] actually some of your early beta testers for your games? Do they give you feedback?
Not really. They tend to hear about the games I’m building before most other people, just because they’re my mom and my dad. But as far as beta testing, they tend to see the game at the same touch points that other people do, with trailers and everything else. My dad is struggling with I Am Your Beast. He does like it a lot, but he finds the pace of it difficult, and he prefers El Paso, Elsewhere to it. Space Warlord is his favorite game that I’ve made. His favorite game that I’ve made and he put a couple dozen hours into that. That was a really satisfying experience. Because if he doesn’t like a game I’m making, as a player, he doesn’t play it. Like, even to be, he’s like “dog, not for me. I’m surprised people paid money for that.” I was like, ‘You know what, Dad? That means that every time you do play a game, it means something special. It means something big.’
That’s great. Your company, Strange Scaffold, how did that come about? When did you make that decision that you wanted to have your company and kind of take the helms of the direction you were going with games for making?
At the time, I had worked on about 40 video games and I was seeing, both from the outside as a player and increasingly from the inside as a developer, assumptions made about how you can build a video game that just didn’t make sense to me. When you have things like the asset store for Unity and Unreal, when you have a development environment where now you don’t have to fight for store shelf space, you can just release your game directly to the world for as little as $10 to just be listed on Steam next to GTA 5. It’s very unlikely you’ll make as much money as GTA 5, but you can be right there. With the awareness of that capability, I had a lot of ideas about how we can make games better, faster, cheaper, and healthier than the industry expects and assumes to be possible. I was told point blank that just all of those ideas would not be valid, and could not produce games that were either profitable or culturally significant, not people trying to say anything negative to me, but just about the way that games are made saying they’re made that way for a reason, and there’s not really a way of getting around it. Crunch has to be a piece of the development process.
You can’t make a game on time and on budget. And at a certain point, I got tired of hearing arguments that didn’t make sense for why games couldn’t be made in a more sustainable way for their developers and in a more consistent quality focused way for their players. And we’ve been doing it for the past five years now. While I also continue to work on other projects outside of the studio, lots of collaborations with indie and now AAA, and I’ve seen time and time again. Oh, the assumptions are just that. Assumptions. There’s a bit of truth maybe at the heart of one or more of them, but the core of the idea that we don’t know we are getting better and better at making games all the time, but we have not improved in the area of producing a video game, producing a project to a consistent reliable quality level on a reliable time scale. That’s something that the game industry has not built processes to enable, and I’m happy to alongside my collaborators and other people increasingly looking at sustainability in this industry, help lead the way and question those assumptions and points to producing amazing games through different methods.
That’s awesome. I had seen a quote that said, I think it was close to when you had released or maybe we’re finishing El Paso, Elsewhere and you were struggling with funding because they were kind of pushing on you this idea that it has to be this type of environment. Can you elaborate on that? What has it been like kind of combating that presumption that it needs to be this type of workspace you need to push developers to work around the clock that kind of stuff?
It’s been interesting simply because so much of the logic that justifies it is purely rooted in gambling. It’s saying, ‘Well if we extend the development timeline by another three months, the game will get better,’ despite having no guarantee of what that looks like or how it will bring about that result. The statement of values for games has evolved over time to be, ‘If you spend more time and more money on a video game, it will become a better project,’ and we’ve seen time and time again that that isn’t a guarantee. You can delay a game two, three, or four times, internally or externally, and still have it fall flat on its face. You can have a project which has taken eight years or has burned people out, and find that it just doesn’t have longevity. Or it does well, but not well enough to justify the massive numbers that have been sacrificed and all the other games that could have been published. It does nothing to justify its existence in that context. So I have found getting support for that, both logistically and financially, to be difficult. But by both the grace of God as well as a business strategy, that as much as possible trying to push away from overextension, we’re still here, where a lot of people with larger budgets and more marketing have not been able to stand or stand to the same way and certainly not with the same track record. As of today, we’ve hit 15 releases in five years. And if I’m quote-unquote doing things the wrong way, I’d rather do them wrong than right.
Right on. I don’t know if I missed this on the website, but where did the name Strange Scaffold come from?
Strange Scaffold was just a fusion of two ideas, the fact that I wanted to make extremely weird things in a very reasonable way. So, you have “strange”, which is self-explanatory, and then “scaffold”, which speaks to infrastructure and planning and into something that is built with foundations of safety. So that together becomes Strange Scaffold.
We are days away from the PlayStation release and almost a year away from the anniversary of the initial launch of El Paso, Elsewhere. I mean, this is so cool just as an El Paso that we get to play a game like this. First, can you kind of tell me a little bit about it, you already talked about what El Paso meant to you. You obviously chose to stay here, but why make it the basis, the title, the titular setting of a video game?
It sounds rad as hell and it speaks to an environment that whether you’re on the ground or simply see a piece of art made from it, is magical. It is surreal. It is something that manages to be human and elevated at the same time. There’s a reason why so many amazing creatives, actors, and world changers over time have come from El Paso is because of that environment. I think you can, even hear it in the name El Paso; maybe I’m thinking about it too much, especially as someone whose only language is English. But, yeah, that’s how El Paso hit me. It’s the meaning I’ve attempted to imbue in that term over time with the games we’ve made around the region.
I think another thing especially when I saw the title of the game first was—I mean I definitely would want to ask if you agree with this sentiment—but my partner, a couple of friends, and I were like ‘Oh is it going to be one of these games that paints El Paso as this rinky dinky town’ and I mean as far as from what I’ve seen on gameplay footage and trailers, it doesn’t do that. It obviously falls into this Max Payne-style shooter, but it doesn’t [paint El Paso like that]. Is that something that went into the thought process behind the creation of the game?
Oh, that’s very intentional. El Paso, Elsewhere‘s location is, even with it being a shitty motel because of just the lore and world of the game, the way how that story quickly transforms and expands beyond its borders is, I think, something to me that also speaks very directly to the El Paso spirit and environment. It is not a rinky dink town. It is a town that has a lot of art and culture, for lack of a better term, vibes that the entire game seeks to reinforce with humanity. That idea of counterpoints, the grounded, and the surreal absurdity and heart, the hyperviolence, but also the beautiful and the contemplative that El Paso speaks, is those things to me and I really hope it comes through in the game. The fact that we aren’t representing it as a weirdly divided region. We aren’t putting a weird yellow color filter over it or associating it with drug culture or anything else. We’re simply saying El Paso is a place where the most intense and exciting things of your life can and will happen. I’m honored that we aimed for that at all because it’s what El Paso deserves.
You mentioned this contrast that exists within the game. I definitely want to talk to you more about that in the longer stretch within your career and the game that you’ve worked on recently. But within this game, how did you manage to pull off the premise of having this shooter that’s killing vampires and these monsters, but then it’s also about that rough character that is killing these monsters and is a hero but at the same time is also monologuing and reflecting on an ex. How did you manage to come up with that contrast in the character?
So the contrast for the character James Savage’s hometown is El Paso, Texas. And I mean,
gosh, even a point to the lore that the more you play, especially when you’ve come by the end of the game if you’ve been finding a lot of the optional materials, you’ll realize that Draculae didn’t just choose this place because it is a it is a one of several points of uh where reality is thin enough to be pierced through right? A place where great power can be accrued or spent. But also, there is the lingering idea in the back of her head that her ex used to live there. The person who most impacted her life positively and the person who she most retains the scars of having pushed away.
That, I don’t know, speaks to me. Relationships have been a big theme of the games that I’ve made over the years, whether it’s a healthy relationship and a healthy long-distance relationship in an airport for aliens currently run by dogs or depicting a fucked-up best friendship by under duress that arises in Life Eater. I end up being fascinated by relationships over and over again. So having this kind of realistic depiction of an abusive relationship, one where no blows were exchanged, but even if you know in your heart of hearts that there was so many ways this thing was bad for you and to you, that doesn’t mean you stop loving that person. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still that lingering feeling. I think El Paso ends up being an amazing place to set that kind of story because its entire nature is about blending.
Its entire nature is about the, I feel so pretentious when I say this, but the multiplicity of things that is amazing for one person or that means something for one person is utterly mundane or something for someone else. I don’t know if that answers your question but yeah the thought process for the setting and for this relationship story is because I do feel like a story like this, you can set it in London, you can put it in New York or something, but El Paso is one of the few places on the planet that I’ve been that has a fluidity that doesn’t just allow that story to be there but like elevates it.
Oh, I love that. Yeah, so there is a lot of playing off of the characters in the setting; it kind of all matches very well. Now, speaking more on broader terms, like in the sense of your career. I saw a lot of your writing credits, checked out a couple of them. There’s likewise a similar contrast. Recent ones, the first ones that pop up if someone were to Google your name, are the Stranger Things VR and South Park Snow Day. Then, of course, there are more, I don’t like using the word serious, but I guess it’s different from those games, right? Like, they’re different in their tone and setting. They’re not South Park humor. How have you yourself learned to write so well under the horror and the dark and the funny and the absurd?
I mean, I give the grace of God’s credit for that. My mom was a surrealist painter. She had a deep appreciation for the arts and a love for storytelling that she passed on to me. The idea of how I got here as a writer is saying that to a degree; if you make someone laugh, you can make them feel literally anything else and really leaning into not having any single story, even seemingly straightforward revenge or Rambo First Blood style story like in I Am your Beast, using that as a setting to say if you make someone laugh in that context or feel an unexpected moment of fear or an unexpected moment of surprise that emotional versatility will let you carry them anywhere else and carry them to higher places is something that’s been a big piece of my career and something I’ve really refined and tried to embed myself in settings to where I can train that instinct further.
South Park is an interesting world for a lot of reasons, but it is one that has legitimately changed the world in a lot of different and weird ways because it carries unexpected innocence right alongside the crudest material you will experience in your entire life. Stranger Things VR gives you this basis for hometown comfort and drama alongside Lovecraftian supernatural vibes. All of our games to date at Strange Scaffold have leaned into this magic trick of if you seeing your player as being a monotone presence to simply sell things to, but as a human being who you want to reach and touch directly and look them in the eyes and have that experience with them. You can bring things to life like Clickolding that even if someone doesn’t like what they played, like any other medium or piece of art, where you’ll see an amazing movie and be like ‘That wasn’t for me, but I’ve been changed.’ You can have that authentic experience, and hopefully, when the right game or time does roll around, maybe deliver the game that someone didn’t know they needed for the next stage of their lives.
I know you did the voice acting for the main character, James Savage, in El Paso, Elsewhere. Can you talk a little bit about how voice acting is something that you got started with and the fact that you do the music? That’s what was so amazing as well for the game.
I’ve always been interested in performance, and I’ve always wanted to do more of it. The only route that I saw to pursue ended up being building a showcase for myself. That’s how I first got into games. I made several of my own games and got attention for them before I got the opportunity to do that more with other places and people. Comics, when I wanted to get into that for a long time, and I was talking to friends about how I do more of that given how much I appreciate graphic novels as a medium. Then I just realized, well, the only thing that has consistently worked for me with this is building my own opportunity and making my own showcase. So, I made the Strange Scaffold comic collection, so we’re working with really talented artists in that process.
So once again for voice acting and for music, I will say that that was a risk here. This is certainly an instance where you step to that plate, and if you don’t have what it takes, if your raps are whack, you’re going to learn fast, and it will bring down the entire game in the process. That was terrifying. But I had really honest collaborators who not just contributed their expertise but their balancing. R.J. Lake, who I worked with on the soundtrack, like, yeah, I wrote the lyrics for those beats, but the refining process together is what I think works as well as it does. Accordingly to people who both encourage me to take that lead and say ‘You know what, we think you can’t do this’ but also be there to catch me if I fall and say ‘Hey I think we can push this to be different’ or ‘We should use this take instead of that take for this version of the game for that reason.’
It’s weird as I process this in real-time, but I would give the credit again, to my lord for my performance and the fact that I’m getting to do more of that now. To my collaborators, because on every project that I do, it is that pushback, it is that back-and-forth in a collaboration that means the acting and that performance becomes better than some of its parts. Because I can give the best gosh dang Daniel Day-Lewis Oscar Award-winning performance for a video game, and either if the video game sucks or if that performance is out of place and doesn’t fully serve the story in a holistic way, then it does less than nothing. So yeah, for that reason, I uplift all of the collaborators, people like R.J. Lake and Romero Bonavausen, and now folks like Dan Pierce and Candace Hudert. The people who end up in those rooms pushing for the best version of a project alongside me they’re the reason I can do the things I do in the first place.
By Antonio Villaseñor-Baca