MultiVersus Director Reveals Whether Shaggy Is Based On The Ultra Instinct Memes

thegamer.com:

MultiVersus director Tony Huynh has revealed a little bit more about how Scooby Doo's Shaggy got into the game and revealed that he's at least a little inspired by the Ultra Instinct memes.

All the way back in late 2021, before MultiVersus was even officially announced, it was rumoured that Warner Bros. was working with NetherRealm on a platform fighter featuring a stable of WB characters, from Batman and Mad Max to Gandalf and Fred Flintstone. The leak also claimed that Shaggy would be in the game and was based on the Ultra Instinct memes that were going around at the time.

Of course, a lot of those details ended up being false, such as NetherRealm working on the game and some of the characters (so far) not being on the roster, but it did get quite a lot right and, as we all know by now, MultiVersus is indeed very real. The thing that stuck out the most with that leak was the mention of Ultra Instinct Shaggy, which was so bizarre that it didn't seem like it could ever be real.

Flash forward to 2022 when MultiVersus was officially revealed, and it turned out that Shaggy was based on those memes, and had several moves that seemed at least a little inspired by Dragon Ball's Goku, including him doing the instant transmission pose when charged up. Of course, due to licensing, MultiVersus couldn't explicitly say it was inspired by the memes, but it certainly seemed like it.

I recently had the chance to chat with MultiVersus' director, Tony Huynh, about the game's upcoming Season 1 relaunch, which gave me the perfect chance to ask him about Shaggy's origins and if he was really inspired by Ultra Instinct. Huynh started by saying that Player First Games wants to make the concept of multiverses within MultiVersus clear and that there are different versions of each character that can show up.

"We want to make sure the player understands where the character is coming from and that we’re true to the original source of the material there. So, for us, you know, it was