I Am Groot adds a new video game to the MCU canon — here’s how Marvel made it

polygon.com:

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy spinoff series I Am Groot expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the most inconsequential ways. Across two seasons of zippy animated shorts, Baby Groot has a fist fight with a space bonsai tree, enjoys a spa day, and meets (and stomps on) a Lilliputian alien civilization, all while the other Guardians are somewhere out of frame.

But season 2 of I Am Groot does expand the video game canon of the MCU, in which a dozen or so real-world games are confirmed to exist, Fortnite and Polybius among them. Groot’s video game of choice appears in the episode “Groot Noses Around.” It’s inspired by 16-bit fighting games like Super Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. (Groot was previously established as a gamer in Avengers: Infinity War, in which he obsessively plays a handheld version of Defender.)

Groot’s video game doesn’t have an official name. But it is codenamed Beach Fighters, according to its creator, pixel artist and animator Jon Davies, whose real-world video game work includes Cursed to Golf, The Binding of Isaac, and Super House of Dead Ninjas. Davies told Polygon that I Am Groot director Kirsten Lepore and her team recruited him to animate a fighting game for the episode where Baby Groot vegges out on a filthy beanbag, deep in a gamer haze.

“[They] proposed a fighting game for Groot to play that he would be happily button mashing on before the battery on his controller ran out,” Davies explained. “They specifically wanted something more retro, with limited/reused animation frames for quick attacks and background animations, similar in scope to the console ports of Street Fighter 2, rather than more detailed with smoother animations like the 2D Marvel Vs. Capcom games. The game was meant