10th Anniversary Retrospective: What Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery means to CAPY devs
Ten years ago today, curious iPad owners across the globe downloaded a strange little game called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Sometimes billed as a playable music album, the collaboration between Superbrothers, CAPY, and Jim Guthrie looked and sounded to most like nothing they’d encountered before. Sworcery would go on to become a breakout success (in part, potentially, thanks to its fully Tweet-able script) and help usher in a golden age of indie games.
To celebrate this milestone, we at CAPY spent some time reflecting on what Sworcery has meant to us — those who worked on the original release, and some who have been influenced by the game and joined in the years since.
“Creating Sworcery with Craig D. Adams, Jim Guthrie, Jon Maur, and Frankie Leung was genuinely a little bit transformative.”
“Sworcery was an important moment for Capy. It helped our studio pivot more fully into indie game development, and expanded the way we think about games. It also broadened our range, set us on a path of exploration in game design, and made us feel like we could create anything.
Before Sworcery, most of Capy’s game history consisted of long-forgotten (for mostly good reason) pre-iOS mobile games, and of course puzzle games like Critter Crunch and Clash of Heroes. After Sworcery, Capy started to cast a wider net, creating everything from bonkers action platformer Super Time Force ULTRA, to the dark and deadly roguelike Below.
S&S also marked the first time Capy worked with other artists in a truly collaboratively creative relationship. Working with Craig D. Adams and Jim Guthrie to create such a unique experience helped us see more possibilities with our future games. Since Sworcery, all of our games have had guest composers: Our close friend Jason DeGroot / 6955 scored Super Time Force, and created a stellar chip tune-fueled OST. Indie hero Doseone provided the soundtrack for OK KO: Let’s Play Heroes, and Sam Webster recently dropped the incredible soundtrack for our latest game, Grindstone. I really feel that these types of musical collaborations would not have been part of Capy’s DNA without Sworcery first introducing this approach to our studio.
It may be the most obvious, but I know that Below would also not exist without Sworcery. After working with Craig and Jim, I couldn’t get Sworcery out of my mind. I learned so much about visual design, atmosphere and world building from Craig on that project. Jim’s music on Sworcery filled my head with ideas. Sworcery broadened my personal definition of a video game, and widened what I felt that I could try to communicate with the medium. Sworcery was as influential on my own work as any of the games that I keep in my personal video game pantheon, standing side-by-side with Windwaker, Shadow of the Colossus, Out of This World, Super Metroid, Ultima 7 and a handful of notable others. Creating Sworcery with Craig D. Adams, Jim Guthrie, Jon Maur, and Frankie Leung was genuinely a little bit transformative.
Watching Sworcery’s impact and influence ripple throughout indie games over the past decade has also been quite something to behold. Seeing Sworcery clearly inspire many other game makers to explore its particularly unique frequency… I can’t help but see little hints of Sworcery everywhere, and it’s hard not to get a bit affected by it sometimes.”
— Kris Piotrowski, creative director
“Sworcery has one of my favourite endings.”
“Sworcery has one of my favourite endings I think because the music and visuals work so well together, it sort of showcases your journey in the game and captures the mood really well.”
— Drew Grainge, programmer
“We didn’t really know know how interactive we wanted the game to be with the music.”
Frankie: “At the beginning of Sworcery, we didn’t know what degree of interactivity we wanted with Jim’s songs so he would provided us with a lot of short loops of music that we could play with. When I finally listened to the released version from the album, there was a moment of ‘oh! this is what it was suppose to sound like. We’ve been butchering it all this time!’ ”
Jon: “There were so many bugs with the crossfading between atmosphere and puzzles.”
— programmers Jon Maur and Frankie Leung in conversation with each other
“I want to create things that inspire a new generation in the way that S&S did for me.”
“2010 was a big year for me. I had just graduated from college, and wasn’t sure what direction I would take for my career. I spent a sliver of time in tv animation for the next several months, but it didn’t capture my excitement. Not much longer, Sword and Sworcery came out on iOS. I hadn’t played anything like it really, in how unconventional and genre-pushing I found it. I credit S&S as one of the first projects to expand my imagination in the potential for games, as expressions of art. After learning it was made here in Toronto, like the hungry grads we were, myself and a couple friends showed up at the studio out of the blue to drop off portfolios. We never had a chance, but they were very nice anyways (hindsight: send an email first). Regardless, I decided my path was in games, and I’ve been fortunate to have the chance to work in the indie space, and 10 years later, I’m here at CAPY! It’s been a pleasure to work with some of the people involved with S&S, and they are still very nice. And now as a dev, I want to create things that inspire a new generation in the way that S&S did for me.”
— Ben Thomas, artist
“An entirely different era of Capy that I always get super nostalgic about.”
“When I think back to 10 years ago when we were working on Sworcery it was an entirely different era of Capy that I always get super nostalgic about. Attending GDC for the first time and being introduced to the awe-inspiring community of indie devs; flying to PAX events with my suitcase stuffed with equipment and merch; pulling all-nighters building IKEA furniture on the show floor and fixing bugs in the hotel room; meeting parents, kids, long-time fans, and even cosplayers to give my game spiel for the eight hundredth time.
And while things now definitely aren’t the madness they once were, it’s not the blood, sweat and tears that I look back and remember but rather the words, reactions and stories from all the fans that our games had an impact on.”
— Ken Yeung, programmer
“I wasn’t expecting that moment with the Gogolithic Mass and it really delivered on the fear and panic that the team was going for.”
“My first experience with Sword & Sworcery was playing the opening moments, up until you get the Megatome. I wasn’t expecting that moment with the Gogolithic Mass and it really delivered on the fear and panic that the team was going for. Shortly after that, I joined the project to help finish off the sound design. That first experience set the tone nicely for me, but from that point on, I was jumping around to different areas of the game to work on the audio and I never really got to experience the game properly. Leading up to the launch, I think we all felt that we had something pretty decent, but an adventure/narrative based game like S&S is hard to gauge, compared to a game like Grindstone, that leans heavily on its puzzle mechanics. So the overwhelming positive response came as a really nice surprise.”
— Sean Lohrisch , audio director
“S&S was a big part of showing me that the kinds of stories I was interested in telling, the kind of art I wanted to make, was possible in game.”
“I first played Sword & Sworcery when I had no idea what I was really, honestly, doing with my life. I finished a Master’s, I was working in book publishing, but I was also reviewing video games and starting to make my own little horror games in Twine. I was on a career path as a book editor, but I wasn’t in love with it (it was just what I had always told myself I’d do when I grew up). But the more time I spent in the games community, both internationally and in Toronto, the more I knew games was where I wanted to be as a career. And S&S was a big part of showing me that the kinds of stories I was interested in telling, the kind of experiences I wanted to create, and the kind of art I wanted to make, was possible in games. S&S was a game unlike anything I, personally, had ever played before, and it opened me up to a whole new world of game experiences. When I think back to it, to what really made me decide to switch careers, it was games like S&S (and Simogo’s Device 6) — these incredible, atmospheric, beautiful games that told me video games could be whatever they wanted to be and games could tell whatever stories we wanted them to.”
— Kaitlin Tremblay, lead narrative designer
“It’s just walking.”
Frankie: “I remember when we showed it to someone, their response was just, ‘What is this game? It’s just walking!’ ”
Jon: “There was a time when Craig & Kris were considering not even having any boss fights. But those battles were pretty cool, especially when timed to the music.”
Frankie: “Our store page says ‘It’s just walking!’ observes Baiyon as a review. It was kind of a meme throughout development.”
— programmers Jon Maur and Frankie Leung in conversation with each other
“We are cosmic friends forever.”
“When I first got my hands on Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP I was extremely confused. It was beautiful and strange and only about 1/3rd finished. There were so many questions I had and it was truly like nothing else I’d ever played. I was relatively new to the industry in the first place and my experience was all with cell phone games (you know, flip-phones and T-9 inputs) so this strange device that was almost all screen containing this game of chunky pixels, beautiful effects, requiring real-world, physical interactions really blew my hair back.
At this point I had no concept of what it would become. I had only heard some cool, ambitious talk (musical exploration, unique audio visual puzzles on almost every screen, a fully-tweetable script). It had seemed impossible that #Sworcery could go on to touch people the way it did. That it could touch so many people the way it did had never occurred to me.
To this day I like to think of myself as the person that has played more #Sworcery than any other human out there (being lead QA on a game like this will sometimes do that for you) and I believe that’s only had a positive impact on me. I still think about this game a lot. I love seeing fan art and screenshots and I have a tattoo designed that I’m very much looking forward to having on my body forever.
Thank you, Craig, Jim, Kris, Jon, Frankie, Sean, Nathan and everyone else involved on this project. We are cosmic friends forever.”
— Christian, QA lead/game designer
“That cassette tape is probably still in that car.”
Frankie: “My favourite song is ‘Little Furnace.’ ”
Jon: “I don’t remember any of the names, but I did have the cassette tape in my old car because I didn’t have a CD player. That cassette tape is probably still in that car, wherever it ended up.”
— programmers Jon Maur and Frankie Leung in conversation with each other
“S&S was a turning point for the concept of game-making, not just for myself, but for millions of creators worldwide.”
“There are a few games in my life which have represented a before/after moment. Games that, in retrospect, were a turning point in how I perceived our medium. One, for example, was Daggerfall. That game showed me the potential for games as playground versions of an other-place, where I was able to determine my own experience, and deal with the consequences of my choices. That shift got me interested in games in a way I hadn’t previously been, fundamentally influenced my approach to creating games, and would eventually lead me to work on the Elder Scrolls franchise some years later.
Sword & Sworcery would be another one of these moments. It came in early 2011, when I was on the team working to finish Skyrim. I didn’t fully realize the influence S&S would have then, beyond being a beautifully-scored game with a striking visual style and novel use of new things like “tablets” and “hashtags”. But in retrospect, S&S was a turning point for the concept of game-making, not just for myself, but for millions of creators worldwide.
Sworcery, and the indie movement it was emblematic of, marked a shift in the democratization of game development. With small teams like CAPY were suddenly in the limelight, on equal footing with AAA projects, millions of would-be developers realized that maybe — just maybe — they could make games, too. Indie games became a meeting ground for anyone from outsider artists to hobbyist programmers to jaded AAA developers seeking to reignite their passions. Rising to meet this call were tools; packages like Unity, Twine, Blender, Gamemaker, and many others owe a great deal to the surge in interest that came from this time, and the result is a beautiful thing: these days, nearly anyone can make a game. (And many of those who do, still do so with Jim Guthrie’s timeless tunes in their headphones.)
I’m proud, ten years later, to be a part of CAPY, and join in continuing the legacy of showing the great things a small team can accomplish.”
— Joel Burgess, studio director
