IGN Interview - 14 Apr 2008

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Revision as of 16:59, 16 April 2008

For the launch of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, the gaming website IGN conducted an interview with The Brothers Chaps, released 14 Apr 2008.

Transcript

IGN: Describe, in your own words, the Homestar universe.

Matt Chapman: ...that is the worst first question I've ever heard. [laughs]

IGN: Not everyone knows that Homestar Runner is, so it'd be great to hear from you guys, the creators, and have it explained to us.

Matt: No no, it's a good question. Just a hard to answer question, which is why it's terrible. I don't know, it's a world full of weird, sort-of-human characters that are missing a lot of limbs...

Mike Chapman: And facial features.

Matt: ...that interact and sometimes behave kind of like they're in grade school, sometimes like they're in college, and sometimes like they're old married couples. It's kind of its own thing. It references the real world, but stays pretty general in those references, so it's kind of its own universe. And... I don't know, that sounds like the worst thing I've ever heard of! [laughs] That's why I don't like answering that question.

IGN: The actual universe has evolved from it's creation to today. Explain that transition.

Mike: Well it started off very kind of kid's book, very general. There were maybe six characters, green grass and a blue sky, and that was it. That was the setting, and those were the characters. Everything revolved around sporting events and it was very good guy versus bad guy. And then as we wrote cartoons, it was more fun to talk about what went on between these sporting events, and then the sporting events went by the wayside. Then it was just about these characters.

Matt: We kind of think of it as the drawings you did when you were 3 years old. It's like a drawing of your family so every person is a circle with legs coming right out of their head, and the car has its wheels on sticks. I've always loved that. Our nephew Colin just drew a picture of a skateboard and there's the skateboard, then sticks come out of the skateboard, and the wheels are on the sticks. So if all that stuff grew up or fleshed out and didn't look so doodly, that's kind of what these characters are. That's not conscious, it's just how they ended up.

Mike: We made them just for Xeroxed, Kinkos books in the mid-90s and when we started animating them it was just by luck that half the characters don't have mouths or hands and stuff, so they're easy to animate.

Matt: Yeah people think that was by design so that it was easy and quick to make cartoons, but we just got lucky.

IGN: And what rolls do each of you take in creating the cartoons?

Matt: Creation is pretty 50/50. We both write everything, and I, Matt, do all the voices, except the girl character, Marzipan.

Mike: That's I, Mike's, wife.

Matt: And then Mike does a couple voices here and there. When the Cheat makes cartoons, that's Mike. But then in terms of animation, because I'm recording some of the time while Mike is animating, and Mike is just faster at animation, it ends up being 60/40 or 70/30 with Mike doing more of the animation because I'm a slow-ass.

IGN: So how and when did this project with Telltale Games get started?

Matt: Right before I had my daughter we heard from them. So we were kinds like "Everything's crazy right now, I'm about to have a baby!" but we were super psyched to hear from them. But Joel, their marketing dude, just e-mailed the general e-mail address on the site. And when we saw that, it was like "Hey, we're from Telltale games." And I already had a subscription to Sam and Max: Season 1...

Mike: And we had played the original Sam and Max and all the other LucasArts games growing up...

Matt: Which is how we found out and why we were psyched for the new Sam and Max. So he was like "I'm from Telltale Games, we just wanted to talk about potential projects with you." So we were like, "That's a perfect pairing." If you were to ask me what game company I would want to call us I would say the guys that made Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, and that's who e-mailed us.

IGN: So the Telltale guys are Homestar Runner fans?

Matt: Yeah, that's cool too. So they e-mailed us so we knew they knew of the site. And then once we started talking to them we found that a lot of the guys there were fans prior to even thinking about a project. And since then, even some people that hadn't heard of it have been won over. So we told them we'd love to work with them but we had no idea how things are going. And then at sometime when I had my daughter they found out about WiiWare and so they came back and said "Hey, we have another idea." So we looked at it, and looked at time frames and we thought we could maybe pull this off and it could be awesome. We're obviously huge Nintendo dorks.

IGN: Yeah it seems pretty obvious in a lot of the references in the Strong Bad e-mails and the games you have on your website that you're huge gaming freaks anyway.

Matt: Yeah the fact that the first Homestar Runner cartoon was made on Mario Paint kind of shows right there where our allegiances lie.

Mike: And then WiiWare sort of just seemed like a better delivery model that works with the way we go about things better than going to buy it at Gamestop. IGN: So would you consider this game your big break? We know the site is very popular and you guys sell a lot of t-shirts, but would you consider this your break into the mainstream?

Matt: It could be that, we'll see. So far we're just hearing from fans that are psyched about it. Once the game is released, or growing closer to release, it will start to get out to people that have no idea who Strong Bad or Homestar is. The way we looked at it is that we just want to make a cool game. And what's cool is that Telltale even told us they wanted us to approach it from that respect. They said they wanted it to look like a game we would have made if we knew how to do this 3D stuff and programming. So that's kind of the way we're looking at it. We couldn't make this game on our website, but if we could, we would. But we can't, so we're working with Telltale games to make it. So for us, we just want an awesome game. And if tons of more people find out about Strong Bad, that's going to be a wonderful byproduct, but for us we're just more psyched to have a game and play it on the Wii and make a cool thing that doesn't break ground necessarily, but it's something people haven't played before.

IGN: Being Nintendo fans, it must have been cool for you guys that Nintendo chose your game to showcase at its media summit last week to launch its WiiWare program.

Matt: Yeah, we heard about that! We just read about it, [laughs] but when we read about it, that was very cool. It was nice to get some props from Nintendo. When we retrofitted some of our games to play on the Wii browser, we were in a Nintendo Power. In the very back they mentioned Strong Bad and that was like a childhood dream come true.

Mike: They mentioned Videlectrix too.

Matt: [laughs] Oh yeah that was the best part. They mentioned our bogus video game – or not bogus, excuse me – totally legitimate video game company, Videlectrix. IGN: We got to play the game a bit. It was very early and the demo was in the middle of the story so a lot of the jokes Strong Bad was making didn't make a lot of sense to the storyline. Not that the stories make a lot of sense anyway...

Matt: [laughs] Don't expect that to get too polished!

IGN: It was very early but it had a lot of promise. It had a lot of charm that you guys put into your flash cartoons – the hidden hotspots and stuff like that – so we're looking forward to seeing it all fleshed out into a full episode.

Matt: Yeah it sounded like the playable demo they found out about late in the game and they had originally planned to just have a trailer ready. So I think for that demo they just had to take stuff from later in the game that could possibly work in a demo.

IGN: Admittedly it was a little rough since it still has a while to go in development, but it has a lot of promise.

Matt: We've been playing the game in its rough format since the beginning, so for us the game looks super-polished because we saw it when it was extra rough. So we've got it coming from an earlier standpoint.

IGN: You guys have your own recording studio, so do you guys work in your own studio?

Mike: For the recording we record everything here. Hundreds, maybe a thousand or so lines of dialogue. So we just recorded them and uploaded it to them. We have a conference call with them every week. We send a million e-mails, and they send us scripts we go over and make slight changes to. There's a lot of back and forth, mostly through e-mail, but through phone calls and whatever as well.

Matt: That as one of the things that we definitely wanted to. We didn't want to be going into some extra special studio to do dialogue. We wanted it to work in the way we make cartoons, which is where we have our little office studio type place and that that's where we have our recording. If they had said "Oh we need you to go some fancy studio and record with this professional equipment," we would have balked at that. It'd be, like, then we can't do it in our boxers or be as lazy about it. It's nice that we're kind of making it like the way we make cartoons, so we're not totally changing how we do things. So it feels a little more natural for us. I feel like that will keep it feeling like a Homestar Runner cartoons instead of a forced Homestar Runner cartoon.

IGN: So you're doing your own cartoons, and the voices for the Telltale game. Is this your full time job or do you have anything else going on?

Matt: We've been doing the website full time for... five years now? Is that right, Mike?

Mike: Six years.

Matt: Yeah. So this is on top of that, which is definitely more work than we thought, which is good. Telltale is letting us be way more involved than I think if a big studio had approached us. It'd be like "Here sign on the line and we'll send you the game in six month, or two years." Which is the other cool thing about Telltale. When we were first talking to them they told us they'd have the first episode ready by this date and it was so soon that we were like "Are you kidding me? This is awesome!" So that's cool because that fit's with us as well. We just make our stuff and we try to update every week, but at the same time we get an idea for whatever and we can make it and put it up in the course of a day. So it was cool that their model was basically the video game equivalent of that.

IGN: Was it planned to be an episodic series from the very beginning?

Matt: That's what they pitched to us, yeah. If Sam and Max any evidence of that it's doing pretty well.

IGN: About how long will each episode be?

Matt: We played through an alpha, which is super bare bones. It's like a glorified text adventure at that point. Which is cool with me if it actually stayed like that. We don't know, we're not sure what the lengths they're shooting for. We're amazed at what they're fitting into it. I would hope that for what it is, and how it looks, and how it feels that it will feel like it's worth way more than what you're paying. I feel like you'll be getting a pretty good deal.

IGN: Will you guys be doing any cross promotion on the website?

Matt: We put up a trailer last week on our website. We want people on the website to know about it, so we'll be cross promoting it like that. We try to keep the site ad free, so since they have the site for it we'll keep a lot of it on the Telltale side, and just send people over to Telltale.

IGN: Will the game ever make it into the Homestar Runner universe? Like, will Strong Bad ever answer an e-mail about the game?

Matt: Eh. I don't know, that feels like advertising. I mean where it's appropriate. That's what we told them. We're extra sensitive about it because this is the first licensing thing we've ever done, so we're very protective of it. So our kneejerk reaction is always "Eew that's gross and corporate and I hate it!" But then we think about it and maybe there's a way to do it where it doesn't feel like that. So far I haven't seen a lot of cries of "Sellout!" which is good because we didn't know if there would be that.

IGN: Well you're already selling t-shirts.

Matt: The difference being that we run all that stuff ourselves instead of somebody else. So nobody seems to balking at that, which is good.

IGN: Do you have international fans and will the game be released in other territories?

Mike: There's the English speaking countries. The UK, Australia, Canada, but that's pretty much it.

Matt: Yeah there seems to be a pretty big Australia contingent. I'd want them to be able to play it so I hope so.

IGN: We know the game will use WiiConnect 24 in some way. Can you explain?

Matt: Right now we're looking at ways to use Strong Bad's computer. Then there will be collectible items that you can trade, like costumes. Kind of like in an Animal Crossing way, like "You've got pears, I don't have pears in my town!" So you can send your friend a hat they don't have for their Strong Bad.

IGN: They made mention that you can create your own Teen Girl Squad cartoon. Is that something you guys came up with or is that what the Telltale guys are doing?

Matt: We're working with them. Like I said it's cool that we're pretty heavily involved in all of it. We're trying to iron out exactly how it will work. The idea is that it's an interactive Teen Girl Squad cartoon. It's kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure where you're dicing the horrible grisly fate of the Teen Girls.

IGN: So do you play as Strong Bad the whole time?

Matt: For this whole series we just went with Strong Bad. We figured he's the most recognizable and, as the protagonist, I feel like he's kind of charming to be the asshole. I think Homestar's got potential for being a lead character, but for this series it'll all be Strong Bad.

IGN: So the first episode is coming in June, right?

Matt: Yeah that's what they're saying. It's still going to be in the first month launch window, so we'll wait and see how the other stuff does.

IGN: Well thank you for talking to us guys. Good luck with everything.

External Links

Interview With the Brothers Chaps