The journey of 'Cuphead'

The journey of 'Cuphead'

Maja Moldenhauer describes how a small team of four people has taken traditional Disney-style animation to a videogame on the opening day of Gamelab

If you want to make a video game, do not do it for money. Let the correct motives propel you ». It was the final advice with which Maja Moldenhauer, producer at MDHR - the letters correspond to the initials of her married name -, has dismissed the talk that has opened the fourteenth edition of Gamelab, the International Congress of the Videogame that is celebrated until Friday in Barcelona. He knows what he's talking about.


Based in Canada, his studio began his journey as a small family business of four people governed by brothers Chad and Jared and published in September 2017 his only game to date, 'Cuphead'. Ten days later the title had reached one million units sold. The reason for success? A bomb-proof passion and determination to achieve a dream: create your own video game.

Interviewed by indie developer Rami Ismail, author of titles like 'Nuclear Throne', the conversation was intended to explain the path traveled by the studio to launch the game. And the story begins with 'Indie Game: The Movie' , a documentary that examined in 2012 the burgeoning independent scene in the video game industry.


That put the two brothers on the track. "You did not have to be a big studio anymore and do a great blockbuster. You could develop smaller games and there was a market for them. " Maja speaks of titles like 'Super Meat Boy' or 'The Braid', whose head, Jonathan Blow, also participates these days in Gamelab.

The first step was to find the genre. They wanted to develop a title that consisted mainly in ending the end-level enemies of the games of yesteryear. «It was the most complicated. Adjust the mechanics and make the physics work well, "recognizes Maja. The plot twist in this case resided in the artistic section: the images on the screen would be animated hand in hand, in the style of traditional Disney films . Nobody had done something similar.

So they started working on the idea, first part-time and then full-time. Thus, one of the brothers closed his marketing company, while Maja abandoned the development of applications for the banking sector.

 "I was very well paid but it did not fill me. I had always been very creative and I did not feel that passion here, "he explains. He also says that he did not feel dizzy when leaving the security of his post: "What I did not want is to reach 60 years old and ask myself what would have happened if I had taken this road".

But when things really took off, it was in 2014. Microsoft fell in love with the game so much that it started to finance it and not only that: they introduced four seconds of the title in a trailer on their brand-new Xbox One. "I think they did not know that we were then a team of four people but decided to take risks and support us until the end, "he recalls.


From that moment, the community of followers did not stop growing and both the game and the team began to expand. Not only would there be heads for the end of the phase but also platforms for platforms with 2D scrolling. And, of course, delays began. "We made the mistake of giving a date, a deadline. Never compromise because creativity does not understand deadlines, " advises Maja.


And when finally decided to make a more ambitious title, "we decided that we did not want to sacrifice anything and that none of the funds we had made so far would be reused for the platform parts." In this sense, Maja recalls with a querulous tone the 6,000 drops of rain that were drawn by hand on one of the levels . "You can not put a deadline to that," he insists. Fortunately, the team was always transparent with a Microsoft that "never cut off our creativity."

A few months after the game was published, after several demonstrations had been made, a section of the public began to criticize the game negatively. Maja account that, although they were aware -difficult not to be in Twitter times-, the comments did not affect them in the least. "Maybe it's because of the Moldenhauer way of being, they like controversy. In the end, there will always be someone who does not like your game. The important thing is to have confidence in what you do, "he concludes.