15 Years Of Brütal Legend

This Sunday marked the 15th anniversary of Brütal Legend, a length of time which truly alarms all of the folks here who worked on it. Time's river claims all things! But if you're lucky, you get to do some stuff which leaves a mark and when it comes to our games here at Double Fine it's fair to say Brütal's got one hell of a legacy. My inbox on social media gets pinged every day and I think at least 30% of those messages are request for Brütal Legend 2. Eddie Riggs' tale of heavy metal derring-do has really stuck with fans over the years, and keeps generating new metal heads as time goes on.

We've spoken about it over the years from time to time. How could we not? But part of my job here at Double Fine is to keep track of the studio's story. When there's time, I chat with folks here in semi-formal interviews so that they can tell me their firsthand experiences working on great games. When the pandemic started a few years ago, I collected a glut of stories from my coworkers. Learning the tale of Brütal Legend's development was really important to me, and so I'd like to break it down into something of an "official" account of the process from concept to release.

Let's get started!

Ideas Are Like Fish

..and to catch the really beautiful ones, the big ones, you need to go deep. Or so says David Lynch anyway. Tim understands this. He's always been a good idea man. It's tempting to believe these ideas appear fully-formed but the truth is it takes time, sometimes a lot of it. The inspirations that led Tim to Brütal Legend's core concept came from a variety of places and piled up over years before eventually coalescing when the time was right. But though the sources are scattered, the seed of the idea can be traced back to one special moment. It all started with Tim's brother introducing him to something new, something that would blow his tiny childhood mind.

While listening to Supertramp, the British rock band known more to progressive sounds and electric piano riffs, Tim's brother yelled downstairs: "Come up here and listen to this!" What was so important that Tim needed to hear it? Iron Man by Black Sabbath. There it was! Heavy metal music! Ozzy Osbourne's unforgettable vocals, Tony Iommi's guitar riffs. It kicked off a life-long love of the genre.

 "You fantasize when you listen to music," Tim told me. "I would imagine all kinds of different scenes when I was listening to songs."

Castles under siege, demons on the battlefield. They were images of high fantasy. Images that would swirl like fish in the pond of Tim's mind for a long time. It wouldn't be until Tim was a bit older and working in the games industry for a while that these images of battle axes and demons started to feel ripe for a video game. Audiences certainly seemed to like swords and magick missiles. Besides adventure games, players were flocking to RPGs.

When Tim was working at LucasArts, their games were often in competition with fantasy games even if he wasn't making games with swords and goblins. Experiences like Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights brought distinct, mechanics-driven dungeon crawls to players with home computers and while these were pretty different from LucasArts games, the overlap of audiences meant fans of Grim Fandango were usually also fans of dungeon-crawling and goblin bashing. Tim certainly wanted to make a fantasy game but that wasn't in the cards even if the kernel of an idea formed. What if you took that setting and cranked it up to absurd levels? What if those battles he imagined as a kid while listening to Ozzy could form the basis of a different kind of fantasy?

"If you’re going to compete with them, let’s really exaggerate it and really take it super far."

What would you name a game like that? What happens if you take something like Icewind Dale and really turn the dial all the way up? He kicked some ideas around in his noggin and mostly tried to consider names that would sound suitable absurd. Chief among them was Omen of Prophecy. Tim thought it was suitably silly since, as he pointed out: "an omen is a type of prophecy!" And so these little thoughts started building up but there wasn't a real idea of what the game could be. Inspiration on that front came from two sources: a coworker's tee-shirts and the 1987 comedy-horror film Evil Dead 2.

At the end of Evil Dead 2, heroic everyman Ash Williams is tossed back in time to the year 1300 AD. He ends up in the middle of a battle between knights and demons, blasting away a monster with his shotgun. In the sequel Army Of Darkness, he uses his knowledge of modern technology to help defend against demonic forces led by an evil doppelgänger. He modifies his Oldsmobile into a "battle car" and uses modern tactics to defend a castle. The idea stuck with Tim and called to mind another story: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This strange tale by Mark Twain has a similar idea except in that story it's a engineer from the 1800s who ends up in Camelot. He invents gunpowder and even uses a lightning rod to outsmart Merlin. In one sequence, he defends a cave by designing a minefield and gatling gun.

"It’s kinda gruesome," Tim recalls. "He wires up the castle with electricity and electrocutes knights who are attacking."

The core idea was fun though. The prospect of using modern knowledge in the past held a lot of potential. The only question was: what kind of person should end up traveling back in time or finding themself in a strange land. Tim's love of handymen and other humble working class folks led to a decision that a rock band roadie might work.

"What if a roadie was the Connecticut Yankee? Connecticut Roadie or whatever... A competent humble person is appealing. My uncles and stuff, people I admired were never aggressive but they knew how to rewire the lights and how to do stuff."

So there's the idea! A "Connecticut Roadie" and hard worker like people Tim knew in his life. But what would you call a game like that? Certainly not Omen of Prophecy. The answer came from a coworker at the computer store Tim worked at.

"In the back room there was a metalhead," Tim recalled to me. "He wore all these gruesome heavy metal tee shirts which he always referred to as "brutal.” In fact, any thing he liked, he called "brutal," so it stuck with me. That part of the name was in my head for years."

A brutal game about times of legend. But what would the gameplay look like?

The Art Of War

Herzog Zwei is a Sega Genesis game that released in 1989 and it's sometimes considered the first real-time strategy video game. Players pilot a transforming mech around a battlefield where they can give orders to units but also, importantly, sometimes contribute directly to the fight. For a game that kicked off a genre, that made it a bit unique compared to games that would follow such as Dune 2 or WarCraft, where players did not quite have a presence on the battlefield in the same way. As luck would have it, Tim was a big Herzog Zwei fan. Even if his strategy was very direct.

"I loved building up a mass of motorcycles outside a castle and just turning them loose," he told me. "I love automatons and robots working for you and I love that disconnection where there's one level between you and the fighting. But there was this option to take your jet and turn into a robot and shoot people on the battlefield. And I love that. That’s why Eddie flies."

As games like WarCraft took off and Tim's love for the genre grew, it was clear that he really wanted to make an RTS. The truth is that Brütal Legend was always built with the strategy elements first using Herzog Zwei as an inspiration. Smashing together that desire with a love of artist like Basil Wolverton, Stanley Mouse, and Big Daddy Roth made the final idea come together.

 "I love hot rods," Tim told me. "Custom cars and demons driving hotrods with tongues hanging out and eyes bloodshot was imprinted on me in the 70s as something very cool."

The full idea was formed: an RTS with rock inspirations where you were a modern person who helped turn the tide of massive battles, giving commands to all kinds of gnarly freaks. It took a lot of different ideas mixing together but there was a name, a sense of the setting and vibes, and direct inspiration for the gameplay.

"I’ll think of an element and it won’t go anywhere in my brain for years," Tim said. Then two ideas will crash into each other and NOW THAT’S A THING."

Metalheads And Sexy Demons

In order to have battles, you need a ton of different dudes. In order to have complex strategy game battles, those dudes need to be part of big factions. Orcs versus Humans. Greeks versus Persians. That sort of thing. Brütal Legend didn't start with a story idea but the mechanical one, and to build on top of that required conceptualizing who would be fighting on the battle. Not in a narrative sense but in terms of gnarly looks and potential units. To make that happen, the team's artists—Scott Campbell, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Razmig Mavlian— started drawing anything and everything.

"They just started drawing," Tim recalls Anything that could look like it was on an album cover! Scott drew an axe car, which never made it into the game but that was an epiphany. A hotrod with a GIANT axe on it! Raz was drawing sexy demons!"

It was Peter Chan's professional instincts that helped bring the process together as he realized the team needed a bit more focus. The free-association art jam sessions started to get organized into themes and potential factions. All of these were based off different genres of metal music, which Tim gleefully educated the team on. New Age, Death Metal, even ideas from the Psychobilly fusion genre. Four factions were chosen: the heavy metal Ironheads, gothic Drowning Doom, and the demonically death metal-inspired Tainted Coil. These are factions that folks know from the game itself but there was one last faction that never made it into the game: the hotrod loving Motorfreaks.

Brütal Legend's art director was Lee Petty, who came into the project after this initial period. His job would be to marry the content of the initial artbook with gameplay needs, as well as build out the design of the world itself. He was the person who told me about the Motorfreaks, who ultimately were cut from the game.

"I think they were probably bit distant off visually from other things in the game," Lee remembers. "They were, for lack of a better word, the most cartoony in some ways. But they were a lot of fun to play and were really weird."

While the Motorfreaks were meant to show up in a sequel, they live on only in pieces of concept art now. Like this!

Beyond the factions, artists needed to design the world and this was a process that Lee guided quite actively. The idea was to take images you might see on album covers—skull-faced mountains, salacious citadels with devils and succubi, firepits—and find a way to build a world around them. This was a somewhat complicated process as the game grew. While Brütal Legend's earliest days were animation tests of dismemberment and rudimentary greybox battles, programmers were soon building an entirely new engine for the game: the Buddha Engine. In video games, "engines" are the heart that keeps a game pumping, a collecting of tools and procedures from which everything flows. Buddha was built for a large game with semi-open world spaces and the challenge Lee faced as art director was finding a way to have heavy-metal vistas that looks good both while you were driving around and while flying high on the battlefield.

"We could fly doing [RTS battles] but that meant we were seeing a game, running on a new open world engine from a height that's not flattering," Lee outlined to me in a chat. "So you need to cull more stuff and keeping that good looking and epic while also being readable and performant was hard. Any time in game art when you're trying to convey a player affordance, any sort of symbolic or readable thing it's often a challenge."

That's the reality of building a world for a video game. Concept art has one angle and view; it's right there on the page. Video games are interactive. You can walk around, possibly fly up high, or approach things from an angle different than what was in the art that inspired that part of the world. You might have memory of fidelity limitations that mean adjusting how a thing looks as an in-game asset. As artists compiled factions and the spaces they would live in, art direction focused on capturing the feel that work while taking into account those limitations. The goal, according to Lee, is not to impose uniformity. The Tainted Coil had a look inspired by Hieronymus Bosch painting but there weren't rules about specific shades of purple or black they needed to be or anything so strict. The goal for Brütal's world was instead "unity" and a shared metal vibe. Not too strict, with room for things to be just slightly off.

"We could break a lot of rules," Lee recalls. The result was a twisting world that players loved exploring.

Putting The Pieces Together

The practical realities of video game development mean cobbling together all sorts of pieces into one big whole. For Brütal Legend, that meant figuring out how to create a strategy game and combining that with other challenges such a boss fights. In those early Double Fine days, the experience was (in both a positive and sometimes hectic fashion) very free-wheeling. Chad Dawson was one of many programmers working on the game, joining the studio in the middle of the process. Having worked on strategy games before, he recalls both the challenges of creating artificial intelligence for units on the battlefield as well as working with world builders like Geoff Soulis on key moments. Each brought unique challenges. For strategy elements, he recalls a process where the art came first instead of a production that designed units based on their function.

"Other studios don't work that way where you take a weird picture an artist drew and ask how can we make that into a game?" he told me. "That's what Brütal Legend was. What can we do with this strange creature that was drawn?"

In many strategy games, you have a sense of what units you need to create for your army. If you're making a historical game, you might have defensive spear-wielders, berserker axe-fighters, and long rage archers. These can form a baseline "rock, paper scissors" arrangement that you can then build around while peppering in some faction-specific units. Brütal Legend lacked the concrete units you might find in a game like Empire Earth, and its collection of demons and gnarly dudes meant that while you knew the vibe for a faction, there were a lot of questions to answer. How do you balance a hulking Black Tree, one of the Drowning Doom factions most iconic units, when compared to swarm of demonic Battle Nuns?

"Tim's a good storyteller but he really wanted this to be an RTS," Chad told me. "Working on that kind of game involves a lot of mechanics... In a historical strategy game, you have the Romans or the Greeks or whatever and they're pretty similar; they just have different bonuses.  In Brütal [factions] were completely different! These challenges was what I was looking for in my career as a game maker. I wanted to make something new! And, oh man, I was getting to make something new."

But the game faced another challenge beyond this: how do you teach players all of this? As Brütal Legend's development continued, user tests rated the experience highly but there was anxiety about a tutorial. Vivendi was the initial publisher working with Double Fine on Brütal Legend and their feedback was clear. The game needed a tutorial. This led to the creation of the game's single player campaign, a decision which both created a narrative that players love until this day but (alongside a demo which lacked RTS elements) led some people to believe Brütal was nothing more than a single player hack and slash game with comedy trickled in. While players have warmed to the RTS elements over time, Tim's pretty pensive when looking back on the development. Which remains one of the game's most talked about aspects.

"I thought the surprise would be okay because of ActRaiser," Tim told me.

ActRaiser is a 1990s Super Nintendo game where players initially slash through side-scrolling levels but it eventually becomes a civilization builder in between these sequences. You place structures and build settlements, all with the hope of making your civilization strong enough to overtake and seal off monster-spawning dens. There's still boss fights and slashing but there's elements of strategy and SimCity-esque gameplay. Brütal Legend, in some ways, inherits that gameplay spirit.

"I’m always telling people that if you’re doing game development, you can’t die on every hill," Tim said to me. " What is the core spirit at the heart of it? If my core thing was this multiplayer RTS thing… was it right to stick to that? Or should I have pivoted completely to a single player game?"

One proposed solution, whose expense to implement left it on the cutting room floor, was to add an option where Mangus, the Ironheade engineer, could take charge of ordering units around the battlefield instead of the player. That would have left the option for fans of hacking and slashing to focus only on the action. Instead, we have Brütal 's iconic and eclectic mix of narrative and strategy. Which, let's be honest, is what the game was meant to be all along. And to this day, particularly on Rocktober 13th, you can boot up the multiplayer for intense heavy metal strategy match.

Sometimes against Tim himself! If you're lucky enough to match with him.

You Cannot Kill The Metal

Another one of Brütal Legend's lasting qualities is the licensed soundtrack with countless metal tracks, as well as the celebrity-laden voice cast. In terms of bringing rock stars and silver-screen actors into the game, the process started with a bit of good luck. Jack Black was also a reference point for Eddie Riggs but Vivendi had experience with celebrity work coming off their game Scarface: The World Is Yours, which had Al Pacino's likeness and voice acting from many members of the film's cast. Why not get Jack Black in the game? You're using him as inspiration for Eddie, right?

Tim met with Jack at Four Seasons in Los Angeles, chatting with on the roof and sharing that ever-important art book packed with creations from folks like Scott and Peter. It ignited enthusiasm in Jack, who signed on the project and became a huge champion for the game both with his energy in the recording booth but also a events like the MTV Awards. With Jack secure, arrangements were made to meet with another Eddie Riggs' inspiration: Motörhead front-man Lemmy Kilmister, who also joined the cast. In Brütal, he became the Kill Master, a powerful musician who can soothe and heal allies with his astounding bass guitar.

"Our producer had worked with him before," Tim told me. He was “You just get him some Jack and Coke and some Cheez-Its and turn on the mic. He’ll make himself a drink and when he’s ready to start he’ll go so make sure that mic is on.”

The result was a breezy and loose recording session full of stories and even a trip back to Lemmy's apartment, which was packed with fliers from old concerts, rows of hardcore jackets and boots, and a Nintendo GameCube with Star Fox Assault in the tray. Lemmy was a rock star but he was also a bit of a gamer. After he and Jack got involved, the word about this weird game spread and slowly but surely the cast started growing.

Rob Halford, lead vocalist of Judas Priest, joined in and contrary to his stage presence, Tim recalls he was very soft spoken. Late to a voice session, he called up and quietly apologized for being perhaps five minutes late. In the booth, Tim's made his shout some random things including "DOUUUBLE FIIIINE!" Which led to the game's famous opening voice sting.

Ozzy Osbourne was added to the cast, joining Tim for a voice session in London. Growing up with dyslexia, Ozzy was somewhat hesitant in the booth at first. A process was worked out: Tim would give a read and Ozzy would repeat it and build on it. I have a lot of stories like this from conversations with Tim, most of them pretty sweet. And while there was some drama in having so many rich and boisterous celebrities on a project, his memories are very fond.

You always think of celebrities as these ethereal, otherworldly species of people," Tim said. And then you meet them and they're just creative people who want to put on a show. It was mostly lovely. Great times with great people, especially Jack."

Rock On!

When Brütal Legend released in 2009, the reception was explosive! The game's world was rich and the characters went on an epic tale that people talk about to this day. Players loved the hack-and-slash part of the gameplay, but we surprised a lot of them when the game's strategic side emerged. While that caused some folks to turn away forever, others stuck with it, mastering it, finding deep strategies and tactics. There's even a mod community on PC for the game that helps keep it alive. And every Rocktober 13 they still come out to play with Tim, earning and spreading the viral, "Six Degrees of Schafer" achievement. It's one of Double Fine's best selling games and the one that people ask me about most. When is Brütal Legend 2!? When! Harper please! And while that's not in the card for now, it's certainly a universe many folks here at the studio wonder about returning to.

Tim thinks often about how Mister Rogers could add new places to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and knows that the world of Brütal Legend can expand. The challenge is figuring out what that might even look like. There was more DLC ideas for the original game, and it was always meant to be a world that could be further built upon. But after 15 years, it's tricky to know what's expected.

"People ask about Brütal Legend 2 all the time and I'm torn about that," Tim told me. "I know some of them want it with an evolution of the RTS stuff and some of them just want God of War with Eddie Riggs. I understand the logic of making the second option, but I'm much more excited about the first."

Chad had a few ideas, wondering less about player expectations and more about the vast options that might excite the studio. "There's so much of a world to explore that could be done in many ways," he mused. "It could be an RPG, it could be an RTS. Or even an auto battler!"

That's all hypothetical. What isn't? Players love of the original game and the lasting effect it's had on them and folks here at the studio. We've been lucky here at Double Fine to have many games that stick with people over the years, and which gather new players over time. What's that feel like? Knowing you made something fun and metal and long-lasting? I asked.

"I think every game we made mattered to somebody," Tim told me. They’re all personal, they’re all games we put a distinct spin on. Art is about making connections. You put yourself into this work of art and someone says “I see myself in that!” and that’s a beautiful thing. So it’s nice."