Cuphead art series#
Cuphead art tv#

Chad remembers watching the press conference from home. The clip lasted only about four seconds, yet put the game in front of millions of people - even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at.Ĭhad and Jared didn’t attend the show. StudioMDHRįor many players, their first exposure to Cuphead came as part of a short clip Microsoft included in its 2014 E3 press conference, showing a variety of independent games coming to Xbox One. Neither of those got very far, as the staff ran into tech limitations, though Ninja Stars featured two main characters - one red and one blue - an idea that would carry through to Cuphead.Ĭhad and Jared see Cuphead in Microsoft’s 2014 E3 press conference. They dabbled with a couple of run-and-gun ideas - one inspired by Contra called Omega Response, another with crayon-shaded characters called Ninja Stars. Then around the year 2000, the brothers decided to take a shot at making a commercial game, hoping to make a prototype and pitch it to get a publishing deal. “Ahead of its time, to be honest,” says Chad. “You play as a grandma and you pick berries and the more berries you pick, you can make more jams or custards or maybe make a fresh torte,” says Jared. In high school, Chad dabbled with simple hobbyist games like one called Grandma Pickins. “It was more a fantasy” at that point, says Chad.

Mine's going to have the first female robot. “Like, this is what this boss would do and it would be so different. “I would do dumb things like design my own Mega Man on paper,” says Jared. And thanks to illustrations from Joseph Coleman, ink from Maja Moldenhauer and coloring from Tyler Moldenhauer, we have those pieces below.Ĭhad and Jared Moldenhauer wanted to make games since they were kids.

Cuphead art series#

To chart that path, we asked the StudioMDHR team to draw a series of images showing the biggest development milestones that happened along the way.

Behind the scenes, they say, the idea started as a small part-time job and gradually grew over the course of five years, ending up as the indie blockbuster that launched to critical acclaim in September. Stories spread about it being one of *those* games, the ones that sit on shelves, cross the seven-year development threshold and appear on missing-in-action lists.īut according to brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, who led the project, that was all a bit of exaggeration. At 42 seconds long, the video established a 1930s art style and boss-focused run-and-gun gameplay, looking like an interactive cartoon.īy the time the game started to gain some traction, the Canadian studio had already pushed its target date to 2015 - a process the team would repeat by later delaying to 2016, and then 2017.įor potential fans, the carrot kept moving farther away. 25, 2013, StudioMDHR uploaded the first teaser trailer for its game Cuphead to YouTube. While the show wasn’t able to pay homage to Disney and Fleischer the same way that the game could, at the very least, it was able to maintain the general idea while putting its own spin on things.On Oct. That being said, every episode of The Cuphead Show! begins with a title card and ends with credits that very much resemble cartoons of the '30s and '40s, and the show even constantly has bits of static running through the screen as if it were being displayed on an old TV.

Cuphead art tv#

As much of a draw as that was for Cuphead, it caused years of delays for the game’s original release, so it makes sense that the video game-based TV show wouldn’t want to run into the same problems. While Cuphead famously used hand-drawn animation to create its rubber hose homage, The Cuphead Show! appears to use a mixture of 2D and 3D animation, likely because using only hand-drawn animation would be too costly and take too long. The two decided to emulate the rubber hose animation aesthetic within Cuphead that they grew up loving, and that same aesthetic was carried over into The Cuphead Show! - to a certain extent. Both the show and the original video game were produced by brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer at Studio MDHR, an indie game development studio, as the brothers themselves grew up loving the early golden age of hand-drawn animation a la Walt Disney Studios and Fleischer Studios - along with the works of cartoonists Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick, and Willard Bowsky. Despite the modern production, The Cuphead Show! has the look of something that was produced roughly 100 years ago, and that’s completely intentional.