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It’s getting close to Roctober which means Tim Schafer’s Brutal Legend is almost here. Recently we sat in on a roundtable with Tim to discuss one of the more anticipated games of the year.

Q: Is the demo single player or multiplayer too?
A: It’s the single player demo and it shows the beginning of the game. Showing the basic mechanics and giving you a taste of what you’ll be doing in the game. The first few minutes of the game from Eddie waking up in the age of metal and the accident that takes him back in time and shows how Eddie first comes upon his Ax and how he puts together his hot rod, Duece. You meet Ophelia who is a major character in the story and you do your first double team attack with her. You get to fight a little uh boss monster.

Q: The soundtrack you and EA are putting out is pretty impressive. How did that come about and was that a goal you had when creating the game?

A: First I had a list of my favorite albums and songs. When Emily Ridgeway, our music director came along, she had to score the entire game. There are all these different areas that went beyond even my metal tastes. Went into more black metal and more industrial metal areas, so it needed alot more expertise there. She actually consulted our local Infinite Records store owner, who is intense encyclopedic metal head he knows all the different genres. So we all worked together to come up with a list that covered all the bases. Helped make sure there was something representing every sub-genre of metal and almost every country and all these different areas to show the breadth of what metal has to offer and I think it turned out really good.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about how the visual aesthetic of heavy metal and heavy metal culture influenced the design design making process for the game?

A: One of the important things when you are doing a fantasy world is to like have a set of rules that you can define to make it seem consistent and real. Heavy Metal even though it doesn’t have any sort of rules, it has one set of rules is what looks awesome on an album cover. Can we mix mid-evil combat with a modern tank or some lasers? Yeah if it looks awesome, because Iron Maiden did that on some covers and it worked out great. There is this crazy aesthetic that only makes sense in the world of heavy metal covers. What I like about it is that it’s unrestrained creativity. It’s just someone not worrying about whether if something is going to far or being offensive or weird or gross. Every time we do a piece of concept art or looked at screenshots of the game we tried to think could this be a cover of a heavy metal album? If it could then it could be in the game. That led to some things that I’ve never done before in a game. I haven’t really had bloody ax combat in a game but that is part of being true to the genre.

Q: Were the challenges that came in the design and development process in creating something so stark and unique?

A: It’s different but it’s stuff I’ve been working with for a long time. In all the games I love demons that drove hot rods. What’s new is really multiplayer. That was kindof a challenge so we started with that first when we started working on the game four years ago. We got that part working well before we moved on to the story and the characters.

Brutal Legend Spider Queen

A: Scott Campbell is our character designer who drew many many versions of Doviculus before we had one that we liked. At first he had a gold mask and he went through all these different variations. (Inspired by Tim Curry’s character in Legend and Vincent D’onofrio The Cell)

Q: Can you give us any insight why (Ronnie James) Dio was replaced by Tim Curry?

A: I think when you see the part and you listen to the voice you’ll see that no one else could have played the part better than Tim. He was alot of fun in the studio.

Q: Do you feel that switching publishers in mid-development was a risky move?

A: Well, it’s always risky to switch publishers, I would advise people not to do it if they can avoid it. *laughs* It turned out to be for the best. EA partners have been really excited the game as it is without changing the music or the game play.

Q: Is there a jukebox mode where you can just play the music from the game?

A: When you drive around in your car you can open up the playlist and you can actually shuffle it around, you can sort it in different ways, turn off songs and turn off whole genres. When you drive around the game you’ll find what is called buried metal, where you can unlock new music that will add to the playlist.

This concludes the first part of the interview. The interview will continue over the weekend where we talk Psyconauts, working with Jack Black and the future of Brutal Legend.

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