And I remember you were saying that Shovel Knight is very,
it's just classic like visually in term of game play.
But it couldn't have been made obviously on Super Nintendo.
>> Right.
>> And can you actually tell me a little bit more about that aspect of the-
>> Do you mean just technically and
kind of like- >> Yeah, I mean, what it is to try to
transpose classic, really loved cult video game design,
but transpose that on modern machines and still keep them flowing.
>> Sure. Yeah, it's kind of like a,
I would say it's kind of a two-pronged problem, right.
One is the technological differences and
the other one is the game play and the way that players have changed.
And the way that players are now versus the way the players
used to be way back when.
When we approached the design of Shovel Knight it was very,
it was like we wanted to do something classic.
We wanted to build a game around one central mechanic, right,
which is what all the great NES games did.
In Contra you can jump and you can shoot in eight directions.
In Zelda II you can jump and you can do your sword attack and you can down thrust.
Mario just has his jump.
It's like there is so few things you can do that you
really start to intuit what your character can do.
And so then you start looking at the things in the environment and
kind of putting your idea,
you're already having ideas what is going to be able to work in the environment.
So it's because you know Mario jumps and that's all he does,
you're thinking, well what happens when I jump when I hit this?
It's like a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right.
So you're already kind of thinking about it.
We wanted to make something like that where it's really intuitive.
And so we wanted the, and so we thought about it would be fun to do like a bounce,
like in Zelda II style down thrust bounce.
And we, Mega Man is my favorite game series by far, so
we were like we want to do something with Mega Man influence,
something with Zelda II influence, something with, I don't know, Castlevania,
Mario 3, all the classics that we played, and just kind of put them all together.
But of course, that had a lot of issues, right.
[COUGH] Like in Mega Man, there's no ramp because you can
play versus any of the bosses all at the same time, you can choose anyone first.
So we introduced a ramp with our level map so there were easier
stages then there were more difficult stages, finally the most difficult.