Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP: An oral history
Celebrate the 15th anniversary of Superbrothers, Jim Guthrie, and Capybara releasing their musical adventure game, and everyone wondering what was up with that.
I've written a lot of game development origin stories over the years, but I'm pretty sure this is the first where I was in the room.
Back in 2009, I worked at Ziff Davis Media on the eighth floor of a high-rise in San Francisco's South of Market district. We'd just closed our magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, and our website 1UP wasn't far behind, yet the office was three blocks from the annual Game Developers Conference, we had an oddly casual workplace alcohol policy, and people constantly funneled in to record podcasts. So we still threw popular GDC parties.
That year, amid some shenanigans with a life-sized Fallout statue in the elevator, frequent Ziff freelancer and A Life Well Wasted podcast creator Robert Ashley brought along up-and-coming pixel artist Craig D. Adams, who was interested in making games from scratch but didn't know how. Adams was handing out postcards advertising his art, looking for developers who might be interested in collaborating.
Around the same time, journalist and aspiring developer Matthew Kumar stopped by to record an episode of the podcast 1UP Yours, and brought Capybara Games' Nathan Vella and Kris Piotrowski. Capy had primarily been doing work-for-hire jobs, and the two had spent a lot of time talking about wanting to do more creative work. They'd also both seen Adams' art online. So when Adams handed Vella and Piotrowski a card, things moved fast.
"We were like, Oh, shit, you're the guy," says Piotrowski.
It turned out Adams lived three blocks from Capy's office in Toronto. And within 30 seconds of meeting, Vella says he grabbed Adams by the collar and shouted at him, "We should make a game together!"
"To be fair, high probability we were all very, very drunk in that moment," says Piotrowski.
(Adams says he remembers being sober. Piotrowski: "Speak for yourself.")
By the following GDC, they had a demo ready of their collaboration, the interactive album/point-and-click adventure concoction Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. By GDC 2011, the game was on the cusp of becoming a breakout hit.
Sworcery turns 15 today, so last week I got Adams, Vella, Piotrowski, and composer Jim Guthrie together to look back on the project that changed what people expected from iOS games, if only for a short while.
Development artwork from 2009 shows some of Adams' initial ideas for the game. | Images: Superbrothers, Capybara Games