CEO of Reverge Labs Richard Wyckoff was nice enough to answer a few questions about the smackdown of violence and sexy women that is Skullgirls, a over the top 2D video game fighter. The title had some recent buzz with added DLC it earned through online fundraising which include new playable characters.
All artwork in this post is from fans of the game.
Jonathan your Editor: Where do you guys
get off coming up with such a strange, weird fighter. No really, how did this
game come about? Can you explain your main role in this?
Richard Wyckoff: Shortly after we founded the company, one of my former coworkers from
Pandemic Studios, Mike Zaimont, showed me the Skullgirls prototype that he'd
been working on with Alex Ahad.
Alex had been trying to get the Skullgirls game going for
years, and with Mike's help had gotten a great prototype together, but as they
said at the time, they didn't like handling the business aspects of game
development.
We brought them on board Reverge Labs, and took the game to
publishers until we found Autumn Games.
Once we got the game funded, we built up the team, adding in all the
additional developers and the dozens and dozens of contractors necessary to
complete a console game. Realizing the
grand visions that Mike and Alex had took a huge crunch from a huge team
compared to most independent development, and we're proud to have been able to
finally get this long-awaited game into the hands of gamers.
You have some very
strange characters? Where did the designs come from? There's a cat girl who can
take off her head, just saying and I do like it.
Only Alex Ahad can explain these inspirations!
(Hopefully, he will. I asked Zero Lab Games, where Alex is now, a few questions too)
Your LA
based, does that change anything or mean anything to your game company.
Los Angeles is actually one of the top cities for game
development in the US. Although it's
expensive to operate in Los Angeles and California in general, we chose to stay
here, where we already lived, to have access to all the great developers here. It's hard to make games when you can't find
anyone to hire!
Now I've had a
little trouble with this myself, can you explain what happened with Reverge
Labs and and Lab Zero Games? Also, it this game co-published by Konami and
Autumn Games?
As we've explained on the Reverge Labs website, not long
after Skullgirls shipped, Autumn Games stopped funding future work on the
game. As beloved as the Skullgirls
universe is, the game itself does not appear to have sold enough copies to make
significant money for Autumn (we don't know exact details, only Autumn has
those figures). Unfortunately this meant
that we had to lay off some of the Skullgirls team in June of 2012, a sad and
all-too-common situation shortly after shipping a game that is anything but a
breakout success.
Lab Zero is a new company that Mike and Alex set up, along
with some of the other people who made Skullgirls at Reverge Labs. Here at Reverge Labs, our staff consists of
half a dozen people who were also part of the Skullgirls team, while yet more
members of the team have taken other jobs elsewhere. And don't forget the more than 140
contractors around the world who were responsible for completing all the
amazing animation you see in the game!
Christina Vee of
all things anime is the voice over director, how was it working with her? Did
getting her have to do with you attending Anime Expo showcasing the game? Did
getting feedback from fans help with the game getting made?
Christina Vee was already a friend of the Skullgirls team
when we started working on the voice over for the game. We were already planning to use her voice
talents when she told us that wanted to try out voice directing, so we gave her
the chance and it worked out perfectly.
I hope she gets to do lots more directing in the future!
It's amazing what an enthusiastic community Skullgirls has,
and we did make a point of how we already had fan art in Japan when we were
showing the game to publishers. I am
sure that was a part of Autumn's decision to publish the game, along with the
incredibly polished gameplay.
What has it been
like to see the game in the fighting tournaments? These can get pretty heated
and the outcry by hardcore fighters in forums can be fun to see unfold.
Mike Zaimont's goal with Skullgirls was to make a
tournament-quality fighter, so it's great to see it getting serious attention
from the most skilled fighting game players in the community.
What's the future
for Reverge? What are you up too? Does it involve more cat-fights?
We set up Reverge to explore new game ideas with new
technology. Hardcore fighting games was
just the tip of the iceberg for us, and though we're not quite ready to say
anything specific about them yet, we've got a couple new games in different
genres in development right now.