Studio MDHR takes us behind the scenes on the two million-selling Cuphead
In the indie boom of the last five or so years, there have been instances of people who were totally new to games development seeing massive success on their first go. But it's hard to think of projects that were as successful as Cuphead. Released in September 2017, the game sold more than two million copies before the end fo the year.
We caught up with studio co-founder Chad Moldenhauer to find out how this game came together and why it was such a smash hit.
So, take us back to the start. What was the initial napkin idea behind Cuphead?
Cuphead always started as more of us asking: 'What kind of game do we want to make?' – without any concern about the visuals or audio side of things. A lot of people when they first started talking to us were saying: 'It's so cool that you planned the game visually with all that 1930-era inspired ideas before you thought of the gameplay', but it was definitely the opposite of that. My brother [Jared Moldenhauer] and I knew we wanted to make a game and we chose to make a game that we could wake up and love working on day-in and day-out. We had this idea where we wanted to make a game that's way more focused on bosses and just went from there. It was originally planned to be around the eight-to-10 bosses in the game and as the game got more attention we went back to our original dream scope. We had all these cool ideas but when we first started it was just a three-man team so we were mature and decided to make a smaller project initially.
Did the team grow alongside the amount of attention Cuphead was receiving?
It kept growing in scope by reaching into our original dream. We never thought in a million years we could make a game exactly like we wanted. But as the game got more press and as
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