Why Vikings on Trampolines Took Two Decades to Make

ign.com:

D-Pad Studio is not known for rushing its work. Its second game, 2016’s Owlboy, took the team ten years to make. It was restarted multiple times due to studio concerns about fan expectations in the wake of a new renaissance for Metroidvanias, various life events, and director Simon Stafsnes Andersen’s acknowledged struggles with depression. And now, D-Pad is on the cusp of releasing a game that’s taken them even longer to complete: Vikings on Trampolines, which has been in the works for 20 years.

Speaking to IGN at Gamescom, creator Jo-Remi Madsen says that their bouncing battler was conceived when he was about 14 years old, playing games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. with his sister. “She would always give up,” Madsen says, because even though she understood how to play, she couldn’t figure out the controller and found his explanations of how it worked boring. So he began working on a game that only used the joystick to play: a core concept that Vikings on Trampolines still rests upon in 2022.

So how did the vikings end up on trampolines? When Madsen programmed the earliest version of the game, he didn’t know how to make characters walk yet. But he could make them jump. “I’m not an animator,” he says, “so if I just make them bounce, I don’t have to animate anything.”

Madsen’s prototype served its purpose, and for about ten years, Vikings on Trampolines was largely forgotten. But when he partnered with Andersen at D-Pad Studio, Madsen shook off the cobwebs and showed it off to his new business partner. Andersen loved it. The team made a new prototype of the concept that turned it into a Smash-like brawler, and that prototype won the first-ever Nordic Games Indie Sensation Award at the Nordic Game Awards in 2011. A