Cuphead is the result of two brothers’ lifelong
dream to make a video game. Growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan during
the eighties, Chad and Jared Moldenhauer spent all their time watching 1930s cartoons, playing
run-and-gun video games such as Megaman and coming up with games of their own. When they were 10 for example, they held drawing
competitions to see who could draw the most fearsome and powerful monsters. Pretty soon, their games got more and more
intricate. Chad built castles in the living room, protected
by bastions and foot soldiers while Jared and his other siblings were tasked with taking
them down with a single shot from an ever increasing distance. They’d also map out complicated board games
with multiple twisting paths. The young brothers promised each other that
when they grow up, they’d make their very own video game together. Over the years, they kept their creative spirit
alive on several different platforms. QBASIC was perfect for creating multiple role-playing
adventure games and Sony’s hobbyist development hardware called the Net Yaroze was the brothers’
choice for developing a samurai side scroller. In 2000, Chad and Jared even tried making
a full game similar to Cuphead, but the technology at the time made it very difficult to do so,
let alone make money off of it without online distribution platforms like Steam. On top of that, adulthood split them up. Jared stayed in their home town Regina to
work at the family business as a construction worker, while Chad moved all the way to Oakville,
Ontario to work as a graphic designer and eventually founded his own advertising agency. Life simply got in the way of their childhood
promise. Despite the distance however, the brothers
still talked frequently to each other on the phone and kept dreaming about someday making
and publishing a video game together. That dream was brought closer to reality again
during the boom of indie games around 2010, which led to the creation of a documentary
called “Indie Game: The Movie”. After Chad and Jared saw the development story
of Super Meat Boy, a game made by two developers, it was impossible to keep their own dream
on hold any longer. Despite their previous attempts at making
games, the brothers actually had very little to no experience with programming or animating
anything, but by now the internet provided plenty of ways to learn all those things. The only question now was: what would they
make? In the beginning, they kept their ambitions
small and manageable, opting to come up with concepts for simple puzzle games designed
for mobile devices. However, the pair couldn’t stop thinking
about another concept that’s long been in their heads. “But even as we iterated on these early
ideas, we kept coming back to a run-and-gun concept we had modelled after the Contra and
Gunstar Heroes games we loved as kids. We missed the fast-paced twitch action, the
giant bosses, and the pick-up-and-play nature of the genre. We knew that if we were going to actually
make a run at this–spend all that time and labor and money on it–that it was going
to have to be something that we loved. So we jumped in.” It wasn’t until 2013 that development officially
transitioned from just talking about ideas and coming up with concepts, to actually creating
prototypes for a run-and-gun game. Of course, they still had their full-time
jobs so working on their passion project took place during the weekends. While it’s true that Jared and Chad had
never published a game before Cuphead, they believe it’s a good rule of thumb to make
a lot of small games and finish those before moving onto something more ambitious, which
is technically what they did as well. During early development, the brothers made
lots of small prototypes, picked elements they’d like, iterated on those and implemented
them in the next, bigger prototype. One day after many iterations, they started
working on the prototype that would ultimately become Cuphead. The project carried the work title “Turbo
Super Mega”, a tribute to consoles of the mid-nineties that had names like Super Nintendo,
WonderMega and TurboExpress. When it came to the visual style of their
project, they were confident they could utilize any type of art style as long as they got
the gameplay right. That being said, the two aspiring developers
did know they wanted a more traditional art style, as opposed to pixel art, where misplacing
even one pixel can ruin the whole aesthetic according to Chad. With games like Hollow Knight or Bastion for
example, there’s something endearing about finding small human flaws in the graphics
and animation. Jared told the website “Nintendo Everything”
that they tried a hundred different art styles, before he and his brother landed on the signature
30’s cartoon style. Interestingly, the original concept looked
more like children’s art. The player would start in kindergarten where
everything looked like it was drawn by toddlers. After defeating a few bosses, the player would
move on to grade one, grade two, grade three and so on. By the time you’d get to grade eight, the
levels would look semi-detailed. At some point during development, they replaced
some of the art with stills from old Disney cartoons as a joke and even went as far as
to add some animation. After showing their friends, there was no
going back. “They said we should never make our game
unless we use that style. Then I started crying, because I knew I had
to attempt animation.” Obviously Chad had lots of experience with
graphic design but animation, and especially the more traditional form of 2D hand drawn
animation, was a whole new field for him. His mission was clear and he started learning
all he could about animation. Richard Williams' The Animator’s Survival
Kit was one of the many resources he used to teach himself the ins and outs of classic
2D animation. Jared on the other hand dove further into
Unity tutorials so he could quickly translate his brother’s early sketches into playable
levels. What followed was months of closely analyzing
the 1930s cartoons the brothers used to binge-watch as kids. Many, many hours were spent watching their
old VHS tapes and the developers would pause them to study the pen weight, tapering of
the lines and differences between frames. Photoshop was also used to zoom in on individual
frames to really get a sense of how lines shifted from one another. One thing became immediately clear: if they
wanted to stay true to that unique style, it was going to be a lot of work to put it
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that artists in the thirties didn’t know how to cut corners to create similar visual
styles. Therefore a lot of the animation from that
time period is done on ones, which means that every frame contains a single unique drawing. At 24 frames a second, the standard in film,
things start to add up. Soon however, artists discovered that people
won’t really notice if you animate on twos, meaning you use the same drawing for two frames
instead of one. This essentially cut the amount of work in
half. Instead of drawing 24 unique drawings to fill
one second, artists now only had to draw 12. However, Chad mentioned there’s something
special about animating on ones. “There's still something very weird and
surreal to see every frame drawn, and that's why it seems not traced, but almost like just
a very surreal motion to their animation. And because we're dumb, we're copying that
style of ... more work.” The fact that playful violence was a major
theme across cartoons from the thirties also lends itself perfectly to a run-and-gun video
game. The more they thought about it, the more every
puzzle piece just fell in place. And so the decision was made to stick as closely
as possible to the traditional techniques of early animation. All the characters you see in the game are
hand drawn and inked on paper, while all the backgrounds are water-color paintings. Many steps are involved to create even a couple
of seconds of animation, from concepts, to pencil testing, animating, inking, scanning,
and then sorting and storing everything. Additionally, they did their best to ensure
everything fits within the guidelines that were set in stone by the animation studios
of the thirties. Things like pupil shape, expressions, rubber
limbs, timing of cycles and motion lines were always cross referenced during development. For the finishing touch, even little flaws
from the limitations of film back then were included, such as film grain, scratches and
noise. And of course, they made sure those effects
were taken from actual scans of real film, rather than just being a digital recreation. Some of the levels have 3D objects rotating
in the background, but none of them were created using a computer. The objects were handmade and hand painted
instead and then filmed separately so they could be added to the game. Basically, they approached development as
they were making it in the thirties, with all the limitations that come with that era. Doing everything this way drastically slowed
down development unfortunately. According to Chad, it slowed down production
by 80% compared to a digitally animated game. Luckily, it never bottlenecked the gameplay. The whimsical nature of 1930s animation allowed
the brothers to be as creative as possible. Not a single idea was off the table. If they wanted a character to take off its
hand and turn it into a shovel, they could make that work. It let them experiment and have fun, adding
to the overall experience of not only developing Cuphead, but also of playing it. There was a brief time the pair considered
doing everything digitally. After all, it would save them a ton of time
and money, something an indie team can always use more of. They created some art using only digital tools,
but they couldn’t get it to capture that authentic look. Despite that, there was one part of the process
that was done in Photoshop and that was the coloring. They put a hand painted drawing next to one
that was colored with Photoshop and Chad and Jared simply couldn’t tell the difference
so they allowed themselves to use this one cheat that wasn’t available in the early
days of animation. Despite this one time-saving concession, the
volume of work ahead of them was a scary and daunting prospect. The only reason they moved ahead with it,
was because of the same reason they gravitated towards run-and-gun games. They simply loved the style so much and figured
if they loved it, there has to be an audience for it. Furthermore, the brothers assumed this might
be the only game they were ever going to make so they wanted it to be the best possible
game and exactly how they pictured it in their head. When all was said and done, over 120,000 frames
were hand drawn. To put that into perspective, the original
Snow White from 1938 has over 250,000 unique drawings. After establishing the artstyle, one of the
first elements Chad and Jared started designing was Cuphead himself. While they knew they wanted to retain the
classic “gloves and boots” outfit inspired by characters such as Mickey Mouse, the number
one goal was to create an original looking character, something that’s not easy to
do in a world where we have a century's worth of distinct looking cartoon designs. The upside to this of course, is that they
had access to a lot of inspiring works. As kids, they loved watching the Silly Symphony
cartoons by Disney and during early development, there was one of them titled “The China
Shop” that pushed them in the right direction for the titular character. The cartoon features inanimate objects coming
to life, giving Chad the idea to try things like giving the protagonist a plate or a fork
for a head. Chip, one of the NPCs in the finished game,
was actually one of the early designs they considered for the main character. It all fell into place after seeing a Japanese
propaganda cartoon from 1936 during their research that has a character with a cup for
a head that transforms into a tank. “We just thought, well, let’s try that. We thought it was so odd. I drew a couple versions of it and right away
it stuck.” After sketching more than 150 different designs,
Cuphead was finally born. The name however never went through the same
kind of iteration, since they wanted to stick to the strategy of older cartoons of giving
characters easy-to-remember names that were often two syllables long. From the beginning, the brothers knew they
wanted to create a two-player experience, but the design for Mugman, Cuphead’s brother,
only took form sometime later into development, after several bosses had already been created. Its design had to mirror that of Cuphead,
but still needed to be easily distinguishable. Researching early Bimbo cartoons, they noticed
several artists depicted the character with an exaggerated big nose, which almost made
it seem like a different character entirely. With this idea in mind, Mugman started to
take shape. When it comes to the overall tone and feel
of the game, Jared and Chad’s love for the more adult side of early cartoons was their
main source of inspiration. Great examples of this are Fleischer Studio’s
‘Swing You Sinners’ and ‘Minnie the Moocher’. As for the gameplay, the brothers mainly wanted
to focus on boss fights, their favourite part of playing games growing up. It provided that ‘on the edge of your seat’
gameplay that they simply didn’t get from other parts of run-and-gun games. Speaking of bosses, most of them were designed
based on how you have to beat them. Before sketching designs, the devs tried to
get a general feel for the size of each boss and where they would be positioned on the
screen. A small portion of the design process also
involved trying to match the boss with the theme of its island. Once all of that was taken into consideration,
Jared made concepts for what each boss could be, what each phase looks like and how to
beat it. He would then pass those ideas to Chad, who
would refine them and sketch character designs. The initial public reveal happened in October
2013, when the first trailer was released on YouTube under the banner Studio MDHR. It ends with showing a 2014 release window,
back when the team was thinking of keeping the game very small, with eight to ten bosses
at most and no platforming levels. Chad and Jared wanted the game to be much
bigger in scope and had plenty of ideas, but the lack of funds forced them to compromise
their vision. All of that began to change however when Senior
Manager of Worldwide Business Development at Microsoft, Alexis Garavaryan, discovered
Cuphead on NeoGaf and reached out to the team to see if they wanted to be a part of Microsoft’s
E3 conference in 2014. It was their golden opportunity to be seen
by millions of people and build up interest for the game, without having to spend money
on marketing themselves. By now, their passion project had practically
become a second job. The brothers spent all their free time working
on Cuphead and to keep up with the rapidly increasing amount of work, Studio MDHR grew
to six people by the end of 2014 to help out with programming, animating and creating the
soundtrack. What’s interesting is that the studio involved
a lot of family and friends during development. Chad’s wife, Maja Moldenhauer, joined the
team as an inking artist in 2014. With no prior professional experience working
as an artist, and instead being a full-time software development manager at a bank, she
fit right in with her husband and Jared. Tyler and Ryan Moldenhauer, two cousins, also
joined the team later on to help out with the artwork. Kristofer Maddigan was brought in as the composer
and grew up just a couple of blocks from the two brothers. All of them would hang out as kids, play video
games together and share a love of analyzing how their favorite games were made and what
makes them fun to play. To keep development costs as low as possible,
the team decided to all work from home and use communication and management tools such
as Basecamp, Trello, Slack and Skype. Another reason they opted for no office space
is so they could hire talented people from all over the world. Confining themselves to the local area made
little sense considering it’s already difficult enough finding designers in the industry that
specialise in classic 2D hand-drawn animation. What’s more, most of the people in their
team are the most creative at various times of the day. Boxing them into a nine to five situation
would have been to the detriment of the highly creative work they were producing. There were very apparent downsides to working
from home though. Whenever they found a spare moment of time,
it was far too easy to hurry back to the computer and start working again. Furthermore, collaborating and seeing each
other’s work in real time was simply impossible, as well as taking a coffee break together
and talk about anything other than work. Studio MDHR lived and breathed Cuphead. As mentioned before, the team did everything
to cut costs and Maja vividly remembers the time when Chad made his own lightbox table
for his drawings and used an old peg bar scanner that would slowly scan one drawing at a time. After a while, when development really started
to ramp up, they caved and bought a 300 dollar printer with an automated scanner. In 2015, Cuphead made a second appearance
at E3, once again during the Microsoft conference. The developers revealed a new trailer and
had even prepared a playable demo for the convention. The very positive reception following the
events at E3, combined with a newly established partnership with Microsoft, convinced Studio
MDHR to take a calculated leap of faith and go all in. Jared, Chad and Maya quit their jobs, mortgaged
their homes to have sufficient development funds and hired a bunch more people, scaling
the team up to 16 developers. Suffice to say, mid-2015 is when development
really took off. Thanks to Microsoft, the studio was now able
to go back to their bigger, original scope for Cuphead, which meant more bosses, NPC
characters, platforming levels and more. In other words, Jared and Chad were finally
able to start developing their dream game. Without any restrictions, the team began thinking
about implementing a charming little narrative to tie all the levels and bosses together. The team wanted to avoid the classic save
the world/princess scenario and make the story feel more comparable to a 1930s cartoon. That’s why it’s about Cuphead’s deep-seated
inability to stay out of trouble versus a hero destined to overcome a pre-existing obstacle. Chad and Jared feel that even though he creates
his own problems, you can’t help but root for his success. People that have played Cuphead know it’s
a challenging experience that harkens back to the NES and SNES era of video games and
that’s exactly what Chad and Jared wanted to accomplish, while simultaneously trying
to provide a way for a broader audience to enjoy it. “We grew up with games that focused on being
tough to master – they were hard but fair. In our minds, there is no better feeling than
being able to master a challenging game, and we are creating Cuphead with that in mind. A lot of games today aren’t as difficult
as older games, I think that’s largely because today’s gaming environment is far more diverse
– not everybody who enjoys a game wants to be challenged like that. We recognise that, and we’ll have some kind
of solution to ensure gamers of all types can enjoy Cuphead. But, at the same time, we are pushing the
difficulty with NG+ to awesome heights!” Certain people tried to dissuade the devs
from making the game so difficult, saying that it couldn’t be marketed to anyone. Every time that happened, they just let it
roll off their shoulders. The team respects everyone’s opinion about
the difficulty, but they were confident in their vision and believed the challenging
gameplay fit the direction of the game perfectly. Kristofer Maddigan told Bandcamp that, prior
to working on Cuphead, he had never written a soundtrack for a game before. That’s why he respectfully declined Jared
and Chad’s initial offer to collaborate on Cuphead. However, the brothers believed Kristofer was
the right person for the job and kept persisting, until he agreed to write a few sound mockups. From there, the soundtrack expanded to a big
band orchestra with music inspired by jazz. Kristofer admitted he watched very few vintage
cartoons during development, as big band soundtracks weren’t often used in those anyway. Instead, he approached the soundtrack as he
was making it in a parallel universe where the jazz age was happening simultaneously
with the golden age of video games. His lack of experience was something that
ultimately benefited the score, Kristofer believes. It allowed him to be flexible and not bound
by any sort of rules they teach in school. The E3 2015 trailer revealed Cuphead would
be released in 2016, but the team announced in 2016 that they made the difficult decision
to delay it to the following year. During that period, Maja realized that projecting
timelines and sticking to schedules isn’t Chad’s strong suit and that she needed to
step in to prevent further delays. Besides inking drawings all day, she began
filling the role of producer as well. What’s more surprising, is that Maja gave
birth to two children during Cuphead’s development. She considered taking some time off after
having her second baby, but Maja couldn’t help but work on her passion project when
she was done nursing her children. Of course, Chad was also there to take over
so his wife could fully focus on her work. It’s another example of how truly dedicated
the entire team was to see their dream come to life and take it to the finish line no
matter what. To further help prevent another delay in 2017,
the studio hired a company called Illogika to help with programming, testing, support
and anything else that came up in the last couple of months of development. The number of people working on Cuphead during
that time came closer to 30 developers. On September 29th, 2017, Cuphead was finally
released for PC and Xbox and both gamers and critics praised the challenging but fair gameplay,
the authentically detailed artstyle and the jazzy soundtrack. Its critical success was thankfully accompanied
by financial success and after only two weeks, Cuphead sold over one million copies. Once the game became available for Mac, Nintendo
Switch and PS4, that number increased to 6 million copies in 2020. On top of that, Cuphead won over a dozen of
awards in unsurprising categories such as best art direction, best independent game
and best musical score. Aside from all the awards, Cuphead also broke
three Guinness World Records in the video game space, namely for having the most frames
of hand drawn animation, the most boss battles in a run-and-gun game and lastly the most
boss transformations in a run-and-gun. If anything, Cuphead’s development shows
that experience isn’t necessary to create a game, as long as you start from a place
of passion. Jared, Chad and Maja had very little to no
experience making a video game, much less one that’s rooted in the golden age of animation
and yet they made one of the most successful indie games in recent times. The whole team learned a lot of valuable lessons
throughout the four years of developing Cuphead and one of the things the team advises other
aspiring indie developers do is the following: “Get a small team, keep your day job, and
use your best judgement as your game gets closer to finish. Be careful before you dump real money or time
in.” Additionally Chad thinks that anyone that
wants to get into the gaming industry should play all kinds of games. Modern, old, good and bad. That way you truly get to understand what
makes a game click and what doesn’t. Jared also shared another lesson with Kotaku. “Expect failure. That’s really the best advice I could give. A lot of the time people think that their
first idea is going to be ‘the one’ that gets them through the door. You’re going to make mistakes and you’re
going to be better at making the next game by learning from what you did during your
first approach. Try to do smaller projects and see where it
goes. Also, make something that you love; it’s
a long process, so if you’re not truly into it, after a year, you’re going to be breaking
down and thinking how do I finish a game that I never truly enjoyed?” As for the future of Studio MDHR is concerned,
the team is currently working hard on the highly anticipated Cuphead DLC called The
Delicious Last Course and is scheduled to be released in June, 2022. Additionally, an animated series based on
Cuphead is set to be released on Netflix in 2022 as well and both Jared and Chad are involved
as executive producers. Everyone at the studio couldn’t be happier
with where they are today and what’s in store for them next. “We’re just so proud. So proud of what this is and what we’ve
made, that it stayed true to our vision. It’s just exactly what we’ve always envisioned. We haven’t formally come out with what we’re
working on right now. It will serve our current fans, and I also
believe it’s going to help elicit some new ones, hopefully.”
