The Making Of...
SKULLGIRLS
Skullgirls, in which childhood dreams became reality – with a few nightmares along the way
How childhood dreams became reality, with a few nightmares along the way
“THE PEOPLE WE WERE PITCHING TO WERE NOT ALWAYS PEOPLE WHO KNEW OR CARED ABOUT VIDEOGAMES”
This is not a typical story. Skullgirls is, in itself, no ordinary game: it’s a fighting game made by a team that had never made a fighting game before, that began life as a student coder’s homebrew experiment and, 13 years later, would launch and sell two million copies. Yet it’s also a story of what happens when just about everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong, and how a team keeps going when the universe seems to be telling them to pack it all in. It is often said that game development is a miracle. Much of the story of Skullgirls sounds like outright fantasy.
It begins in 1999. Mike Zaimont had loved fighting games since he was a kid – at 15, he bought a Killer Instinct cabinet from his local arcade when it closed down, a friend on the high-school wrestling team lugging it upstairs – and always wanted to make one of his own. He spent $300 on a rare broadband adaptor so he could use a homebrew bootloader to run code on his Dreamcast. A fighting-game engine began to take shape but, without an artist, he could only go so far. He graduated from college and joined Pandemic Studios, working on Star
Wars Battlefront and its sequel. He was soon introduced, by one of his
Guilty Gear sparring partners, to Alex Ahad, an illustrator working at anime-themed social network Gaia Online. As luck would have it, Ahad had been working on a cast of characters for a fighting game since high school. “He’d already worked with several programmers, and there were two or three versions of an engine, and I didn’t want to intrude on that at all,” Zaimont recalls. Instead, he wrote to Ahad and asked if he could use his characters to help him develop his engine without worrying about being sued. Ahad agreed, sending over artwork for one of his game’s characters, Filia. By way of thanks, Zaimont sent back a build of his engine with Filia playable. Ahad got back in touch, suggesting they work together.
They did, but only in their spare time at first. “I couldn’t bring myself to quit Pandemic,” Zaimont says. “Giving up security is really hard.” Before long EA made his decision for him, shuttering Pandemic, and he began working on
Skullgirls full time, living off his savings. Ahad soon quit his job at Gaia, and things started moving more quickly. Their first job was to essentially remake the game in HD: the technology was all the rage by now, but it hadn’t even existed when Zaimont started tooling around on the Dreamcast and Ahad began doodling fighting-game characters on his sketchpad. Eventually, there was a prototype – something the pair could pitch to publishers in the hope of getting the game made.
Their early meetings were chastening. “Several companies asked us questions we were completely unprepared to answer, and which we didn’t agree with being asked,” Zaimont tells us. “A bunch asked us, ‘What’s the game’s target demographic?’ It was like, ‘I dunno, people that like the game?’ We had one company ask why everyone was the same height. We were like, ‘They’re… not?’ It became very clear during that process that the people we were pitching to were not always people who knew about, who played, or even who cared about videogames. It made a large impact on us in terms of choosing who we wanted to work with.”
One company Zaimont and Ahad did want to work with was Reverge Labs, a new Los Angeles studio set up by one of Zaimont’s old Pandemic colleagues, Richard Wyckoff. Reverge set up some more productive meetings with prospective partners, one of which was Autumn Games, the New York-based publisher of hip-hop karaoke game Def Jam Rapstar. Three people came to the meeting; Zaimont was showing the game to one of them while the other two chatted business across the room. Zaimont taught his unskilled charge to do a dragon punch motion, then to do it again with two attack buttons instead, to perform Filia’s spectacular Fenrir Drive super move. “He did that, and, like, yelped,” Zaimont recalls. “The other two people came over and said, ‘Do it again’. It took him a while, but he got it, and they turned to us and said, ‘Okay, we’d like to talk to you about this’.” That meeting taught Zaimont a valuable lesson about the importance of making prototypes. “You never know what’s going to catch someone’s fancy. But if you don’t have it to show them, you’ll never find out.”
Autumn gave the team enough funding to get set up – and, crucially, a means to get Skullgirls onto Xbox 360. While Reverge could publish
Skullgirls on PS3 and Steam by itself, Microsoft’s publishing terms in the 360 era were infamously restrictive: you could only publish a game for the console if you’d previously published another one, or else signed the rights away to Microsoft itself. Thanks to Def Jam Rapstar, Autumn had a business arrangement with Konami. The deal was extended to include Skullgirls, with Konami publishing it on Xbox 360 and PS3. With the business stuff out of the way, or so they thought, the team got to work. Skullgirls was happening.
Zaimont embarked on the project with some lofty goals, the naïvete of a first-timer leading him to seek to fix a lot of problems that have dogged fighting games for years. Skullgirls had an automated system that detected infinite combos and shut them down, a ceasefire in the arms race between the players that break games and the developers that have to fix them. He did likewise for unblockable attacks, and devised a novel system to prevent players jumping when performing 360-degree motions for certain special moves (though he would later realise Neo-Geo fighting game Breakers Revenge did it first). Yet Zaimont didn’t set out to fix all fighting games – just one of them.
“The original goal was: ‘Fix Marvel 2’,” he laughs, referring to Marvel Vs Capcom 2: New
Age Of Heroes, the three-on-three Capcom crossover game that launched in 2000 and was a tournament fixture for well over a decade. “It’s still one of my favourite games, but there were a lot of problems with it. Picking your characters took forever, and in the home version, if you wanted a rematch, everybody had to pick their teams again. There was gameplay stuff,
like being hit by infinites. And there was the relative balance of the characters. There was enough of a top tier for the game to be really fun at a high level, but there were 50 other characters you couldn’t use. The main design goal was for
Skullgirls to be that level of interesting – where you can just go into training mode and emerge nine hours later wondering where the time went, or play 100 games with a person and not even notice – but not have any of the problems that were the reason why a lot of people quit.”
Zaimont came from the competitive fightinggame scene, and knew that to be a good player you had to know how games work. He took
Skullgirls to every tournament he could, showing it to players and asking for feedback. One day he received an email from ‘Ya Boi Dekillsage’, profanely complaining that he’d been robbed of an important win by an animation bug. Zaimont had never heard of the kid, but went looking for the bug, found it and squished it. Dekillsage turned out to be one of the best Skullgirls players in the world, winning the Evo tournament in 2014.
“That letter was instrumental in how I approached community from then on. I realised you can’t ignore anybody,” Zaimont says. “I would get tons of emails and messages from people and I would read them all and respond to them all, no matter how dumb they sounded. People would ask me, ‘Why do you do this?’ Well, for every hundred that are terrible, there’s one that has good ideas in it.” One of Skullgirls’ greatest gifts to the tournament scene was making it so you had to hold the Start button to pause the game, rather than just tap it. Errant button presses can happen in the heat of the moment, and in a tournament match, pausing the game means forfeiting the round. Other games have since adopted the idea, which Zaimont found one day in his inbox.
Zaimont didn’t just have an eye on the competitive scene, however. While he certainly wanted his game to address the tournament player’s frustrations, he also wanted it to appeal to complete beginners. That starts with the game’s tutorial, which is still regarded as among the genre’s best. Yes, it teaches you how to play
Skullgirls. But more importantly, it also teaches you how to play fighting games, explaining the theory behind fundamental genre concepts, then having you put them into practice. “I’ve taught a lot of people how to play fighting games. I wanted the tutorial to actually make you learn, instead of just making you perform.”
Defence was particularly important, Zaimont felt. “A lot of fighting-game tutorials are like, ‘Block one hit. Nice work!’ And then they never talk about defence again. It’s just nuts. Defence is such a hugely important part of playing that is completely ignored because it doesn’t look cool.” One of the first things Zaimont designed was a tutorial about dealing with ‘mix-ups’, with an AI opponent randomly alternating between high and low attacks. He put it in front of as many novice players as he could, including Skullgirls’ voice actors, who would pop into the office to see what their characters looked like before recording. “It usually took them around half an hour,” he says. “First they were like, ‘This is really hard’. Then at some point they would turn to me and say, ‘Why aren’t I holding down-back all the time?’” (This puts the character in a crouch-block position, enabling them to stand their ground, guard against all low attacks by default, and only have to adjust if the opponent tries to hit high.) “I was like, ‘ I don’t know. Why aren’t you?’ That was the point at which they would learn that, if you default to something, you can react to the other things.”
Skullgirls launched in April 2012, selling 50,000 copies in its first week on consoles, a fine return for a game in a certain niche. It’s a happy time for a game developer, the pressure of the final sprint behind you, the game out in the wild and being enjoyed by players old and new. Work began on DLC. Then, one day the following month, the entire team was laid off.
Def Jam Rapstar was already in legal trouble: record label EMI had filed an $8 million lawsuit against its developers, 4mm and Terminal Reality, shortly before Skullgirls’ release, claiming none of the 54 songs featured in the game had been properly licensed for use. Rapstar had launched in 2010, and had tanked, only selling around half a million copies. It was funded through a $15 million loan from City National Bank, based on Autumn Games and Konami claiming it would sell 2.5 million (which the lawsuit called “baseless and unrealistic”). Two years later, not a penny had been repaid, and the bank wasn’t happy. It wanted the money back, and $9 million in damages on top.
“We were working on Squigly, the first DLC character,” Skullgirls’ lead designer Peter
Bartholow tells us. “The lawsuit had gotten pretty bad, and Konami was draining Autumn’s finances through legal costs. Autumn was VC-funded; by having a claim against their income, nobody could fund them.”
Autumn owned the Skullgirls IP, but in letting the team go made it clear that, if they wanted to
continue to work on the game under a new studio name, it wouldn’t stand in their way. Lab Zero Games was duly formed, with Bartholow its CEO. It operated with no funding for the best part of a year; while the DLC plan was shelved, the crew did manage to support the game with patches. “We decided, ‘All right, we’ll try this for a year until we can’t handle it anymore and we’ll see what happens’,” Zaimont says. “When we got to that point we thought, ‘Okay, we have two choices. We can quit now, or we can try crowdfunding, and then quit when it doesn’t work. There’s no real downside, because we don’t have another choice. We’ll try.’”
A crowdfunding campaign was planned, then put on hold. The organisers of Evo 2013 were running a charity donation drive, raising funds for breast cancer research; the game which brought in the most donations would be the final selection for the main stage at what is essentially the Super Bowl of fighting games, watched by millions the world over. Skullgirls was in contention, and Lab Zero decided to throw its young weight behind it. “We were in fierce competition with Super
Smash Bros Melee,” Bartholow says. “We raised $78,000 and they won with $95,000, but Smash would have won with $9,000 if we hadn’t engaged with it. It was a really fun community experience, our voice actors got involved, and Evo was super gracious. Because we’d pushed the competition to levels they hadn’t expected, they basically gave us 95 per cent of the prize. We weren’t an official tournament game but we got stream time, we got some stage time. It helped
Skullgirls’ visibility a lot. And I think it primed people to be in a giving mood.”
At the end of the charity drive, Lab Zero announced its crowdfunding campaign, seeking $150,000 on Indiegogo for the release of the long-planned DLC character Squigly. The team expected little. “It was kinda just to placate the people that kept telling us we should try it,” Bartholow says. “We thought, best case, we’d fund Squigly and have some bridge money to keep us going until we could sign another project.” Zaimont was so sure it would fail that he’d taken a job at Iron Galaxy, which had taken over development duties on Xbox One exclusive Killer
Instinct. “We thought it was going to be closure,” he says. “‘We tried, we’re sorry to all our fans, there’s nothing we can do.’” Indeed, so low were his expectations that the campaign launched on his first day working on Killer Instinct. “We put the crowdfunding drive online and I went to work. We funded Squigly that night. The next day I came into the office and was like, ‘Hello! I need to work less than four days a week’.”
The campaign ended up raising over $850,000, reaching enough stretch goals for not one DLC character, but five. Great news, but not without its problems – while Squigly had been in the works for a while and the first stretch-goal character, Beowulf, wasn’t far off, after that Lab Zero had nothing. It hadn’t expected to succeed; the additional funding goals were for mystery characters for more reasons than piquing interest. Still, with money in the bank, they set to work.
Lab Zero was no longer working with Autumn Games, but still had to deal with Konami if it wanted its DLC characters on Xbox 360. As part of its publishing terms, Konami insisted on handling QA for the Skullgirls DLC, and was charging through the nose. The studio managed to strike a deal with its producer at Konami. “We would be able to use a thirdparty QA team that was cheaper,” Bartholow says, “then Konami would do a final sweep for TRC before submission. But by the time we were ready to release Squigly, that producer had left the company.
“The lawsuit had been settled, but there was probably a lot of bad blood there. Konami wanted to dissolve the business relationship entirely, so were no longer interested in the deal we negotiated. We paid for all the thirdparty testing, then they insisted they would have to do it all again at their rates. We couldn’t afford that. At that point Konami and Autumn moved to dissolve the relationship between them officially.”
Not only did that leave Skullgirls without a publisher for its DLC; it also led Konami to demand the game be delisted from Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. The team had gone too far to give up now. The rebadged Skullgirls Encore was back on PSN within a couple of months, and the 360 version followed soon after. It made its way to Vita, to PS4 and Xbox One, to smartphones and Japanese arcades, and is currently in development for Nintendo Switch. Lab Zero, against all odds, is still here: Skullgirls’ crowdfunding success has proved invaluable in the development of its current project, Indivisible, which has raised more than $2 million on Indiegogo.
It’s a story with a happy ending, and one that many wouldn’t have seen through to its conclusion. Many would, at some point or other, decide that the fates were conspiring against them, take the hint and walk away. In closing, we ask Zaimont how the team possibly kept up morale while everything around them seemed to be falling apart.
“We didn’t,” he says. “There were a lot of times where people were just, like, ‘This really sucks’. Morale was not necessarily kept up, but making a fighting game had been the prime development goal I had. It was like, ‘We have this thing. It exists, people are playing it, people like it. I can’t let go of it without having done every possible thing that we can do.’ Work for free, work nights and weekends – when you have something you can do, you’re an idiot if you don’t give it everything you can, because you can’t come back to it later and give it more.”