David Jaumandreu and I are supposed to be having our interview about his upcoming game, Denshattack, in a studio built out to look like a train. And we will, eventually, as you’ll see from the video above. But before we shoot the video version, we chat for my written piece in a very different setting: a dungeon.
Jaumandreu is sitting on an inexplicable throne, like you’d find in a king’s palace, while I sit atop a different sort of throne: an actual toilet. There are fake shackles against the stone walls around us, and bars on the window. Behind us, through a sliding door, is the train studio we’ll be using in 30 minutes.
I don’t have a clever way to transition Jaumandreu and my dungeon adventure into something about Denshattack!, or even trains. But Jaumandreu is effusive about the silly setting we’re in. He has every reason to be happy right now: he’s in his favorite place in the world, after all.
No, I don’t mean the dungeon. I’m talking about Japan.
Jaumandreu has traveled halfway around the world to promote his upcoming game: Denshattack!, which he describes as “Tony Hawk with Japanese trains.” He’s leading its development as the studio director of Undercoders, which was founded in 2005 in Barcelona. It began as a mobile development studio and eventually transitioned to DSi development and later to console with games like Conga Master and Treasures of the Aegean. The core team is just 12 people, even a whopping 20 years after its founding, though Jaumandreu says they do work with external developers on things such as music and animation when support is needed.
So what’s a Barcelonan studio doing making a game that’s hyperspecifically focused on Japanese trains? Put simply, Jaumandreu loves Japan, and he loves the train system there. That’s the long and short of it.
“I came [to Japan] in ’98 for the first time,” he tells me, speaking from the throne. “I came just for tourism. My father used to travel a lot for work, so I had the opportunity to follow him on one of his trips here, and it captivated me so much that I just wanted to come back again and again and again.”
Jaumandreu was 16 on that first trip – he’s a few decades older now, and has been back to Japan almost yearly since that first trip.
“There’s so much to like,” he continues. “When I came here, it was obviously because I was a kid. I loved Dragon Ball, I loved video games, you know? And back then, Japan was the biggest force in making video games. Nintendo, PlayStation, whatever. But I came through this fascination, and then got fascinated by the country itself. Its history, it’s super interesting, its culture. Whenever you get to know it more, there are more layers of interesting stuff to get. The cinema is fantastic, the food is incredible. Pop culture. No, it’s a mix of a lot of things, and whenever you get deeper into the country, you find more interesting stuff. So of course the first time I got here was Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Then you start exploring more the rural side, and that’s what it started to get to me.”
Of course, Jaumandreu especially loves Japan’s train system. He rode the subway on his first visit, the Yamanote line that runs in a circle through Tokyo’s biggest areas. At the time, trains in Japan didn’t have any English voices on the intercom or English words on the signs, so all he had to go on was his guidebook for navigation. “It felt like a big adventure.” Especially, he says, compared to trains in Barcelona, which were good but not nearly as advanced technologically. “To put it in perspective, back when I came here, the difference was it was like looking 20 years in the future, and now we’ve kind of reached that point, I guess.”
Then, Jaumandreu got to ride the Shinkansen, the bullet train, and he was blown away. “It’s incredibly fast and silent at the same time, so it feels super calm, and you’re going so fast. It feels, I don’t know, discontextualized. The incredible speed that you’re going, and it doesn’t move or shake or whatever. It’s a super smooth ride. It’s super comfortable.”
It was out of this love that Denshattack! Was born. One day, Jaumandreu says, he was playing with a little toy train he had, and the ideas began to flow.
“I was, you know, finger skating with a train. Like you’re bored. And I was doing this and that. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool. We could make a game out of this.’ I started thinking about it and giving a lot of thought to how that would translate into gameplay. And I used to skate, and I’m big fan of the Tony Hawk games especially, and it was like, ‘How would you do this? How would you control this?’ So yeah, I brought a train piece to work, started showing the team some moves, and then I presented to the rest of the team and they told me, ‘They’re shit.’ ‘Are you crazy?’ And then [my coworker] who is super fast in Unreal, I think he spent couple of days with that and he came out and said, ‘There’s definitely a game here. It’s super fun.’”
Denshattack! has been in development now for three years. It’s visually inspired by Jet Set Radio, Hi-Fi Rush, and Persona, and set to music by Sonic Mania’s Tee Lopes. In it, you control a train as if you were controlling a skateboard, where the landscape, cities, and other landmarks become a skate park. Jaumandreu describes gameplay in two parts: there’s a “flow state” gameplay where you’re focused on getting from point A to B, doing tricks and avoiding derailing as you go. And then there are missions where you’ll race rivals, try to get a high score from doing tricks, or even fight bosses like giant mechs. And Denshattack! combines all this with a Shonen anime story about found family, rebellion, and making friends with your rivals.
As we wrap up our interview and prepare to move out of the dungeon and into the train studio to record, I ask Jaumandreu one last, critical question. What’s his favorite ekiben, or train bento box?
He starts to say his favorite is the ones that self-heat when you pull a little tab out. But then he brings up an even more apropos answer: he likes the kid’s meals, because they come in a box shaped like a train.
Denshattack! is planned for release in spring 2026 for PC, Xbox Series (including on Game Pass), and PlayStation.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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