Adult Swim is known for some of the weirdest, strangest cartoons ever created. This culture of promoting new and emerging talent goes deep within the company, and is now starting to flourish in its video game releases. What started as a browser-based game venture has now turned into PC, console and mobile games.
“Adult Swim on TV, they like to find creative voices and individuals and give them a platform to produce content for that. On the games side, we’re kind of doing a very similar thing,” Chris Johnston, Senior Games Producer at Adult Swim, told iDigitalTimes.
“We started doing browser games, stopped making games based on shows, and focused on working with indie developers on browser games,” he said. “That kind of evolved into doing mobile games. Once the browser market kind of fell out, we started moving those games to PC.”
Thanks to early success, Adult Swim games has continued publishing games. “Super House of Dead Ninjas started out as House of Dead Ninjas, a browser game,” said Johnston. “We brought those to Steam and had some success there, so we’ve just taken it from there.”
The company is now publishing the latest game from developer Double Fine, Headlander, a weird 2D sidescroller where players take control of the last human head in existence. Like Futurama , the head is kept alive in a tank that’s capable of flying around thanks to booster jets.
“We’ve always been big fans of Double Fine’s output and thought it would be a great team-up if we could work on a game with them,” Johnston said of Adult Swim’s involvement on the project. “They have such a great sense of humor, a great a great style. Adult Swim is humor and style too.”
“We started talking to them on what project we could work on, and Lee Petty, the artist for Stacking and Broken Age had this concept - Headlander - that had been kicking around for a while,” said Johnston. “We were just like ‘oh my god, this concept is so great. 1970s sci-fi is such a great genre and the era and the style is so great. We gotta help you guys make this a full game.’”
Double Fine is an experienced company and didn’t really need as much help or input from Adult Swim on development. “We’re pretty hands-off with Double Fine,” Johnston said. “They know what they’re doing. They’re great at creative, great at humor. We’ve encouraged them to just run wild and do whatever they can.”
As for what’s next on Adult Swim Games’ horizon, it’s possible even more crazy things could come from the publisher. When asked about potential for a VR game, Johnston couldn’t confirm anything, but it could be a possibility for the future. “We’re doing PC and console games, and VR is getting to be a big interest for PC and console,” Johnston said. “We’re just focusing on the products we have right now, but I’m sure we’ll take it from there.”
So what do you think? Are you interested in trying out Double Fine’s latest, Headlander? Are you happy to see Adult Swim Games positioning themselves like the TV counterpart? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
