Why Cuphead was a Success

Even though Cuphead released in 2017, the evolution of the game took decades beginning with the Moldenhauer’s being inspired by the early days of the run and gun genre with classics like Contra and Metal Slug. Success didn’t happen overnight and here are few lesser known facts about Cuphead.

Feedback

Over the course of development, one of the most important things was listening to feedback. This involved changing art styles multiple times before landing on the 1930’s animation style that we know and love. The first concept was going through the art of an elementary school with the blueprint for levels being things like hand paintings. Once they showed the 1930’s concept to their friends they realized using that style was a “shoe-in and dove in” according to Chad.

Commitment

20 plus years and staying true to the art style when it felt risky shows their commitment. The first run and gun prototype was called Omega Response inspired by Contra. The second was crayon shaded called Ninja Stars with two main characters, one red and one blue, which lived on in Cuphead. The timing wasn’t right and development stopped until around 2010 when ideas started to get thrown around again.

Everything is hand drawn, hand inked, using water color background and real physical models that are built in the real world. The only shortcut Studio MDHR uses was digital colouring, due to testing it out side by side and not being able to tell the difference. Accorinding to Chad “this shaved 5 years off development time.

Dedication

For the first half of development, Jared was still working full time in construction and then would work on the game during the evenings. Each frame of the game takes approximately 25 minutes draw, some attacks could take upwards of 30 frames and the base Cuphead game features close to 50 000 frames. Sadly, some of this came at a price as the two brothers crunched to the tune of 34 hours straight

Sacrifice

After E3 2015, when the game was revealed on the Xbox stage, the brothers saw the demand for the game and realized that the only way to fully commit to the development of Cuphead was to quit their jobs. Sadly, this would require more than just the brothers putting more hours into the game as they needed to hire more people and they did this by digging into their savings, getting personal bank loans and both remortgaging their houses.

Passion

Over the development of Cuphead, you can see how passionate Studio MDHR was from the dedication, commitment, the sacrifices they made to the openness and vulnerability to listen to feedback which helped make the game the best it could possibly be.