Spelunky 2 is so ambitious that even Derek Yu doesn’t know what you’ll find in its darkest depths

Spelunky’s creator reveals why the sequel needed a bigger team behind him.

On December 21, 2008, Derek Yu released an experimental piece of freeware onto the internet. “Hope you enjoy it”, he wrote in the accompanying post, “I am eagerly awaiting your feedback, whether it’s good, bad, or frickin’ beautiful.” The first players got spelunkin’, and the rest, as they say, is history.

12 years later, Spelunky is considered one of the most important games of its era; a catalyst for the indie scene that popularised the roguelite genre and inspired countless developers to try their hand at solo game creation. Now, Yu is returning to his subterranean sandbox with an official sequel, Spelunky 2, and we speak ahead of its launch this month.

“The first Spelunky never felt like the end of the series to me,” he tells me of the sequel’s origins. “It always felt like there was a lot more that we could do with the core concept and mechanics. After the PC release of the game, I wrote a book about it for Boss Fight Books and spent a lot of time thinking about its development, which gave me a better sense for what a sequel might look like.”

“What really made the project real for me, though, was being able to work with BlitWorks and [ Spelunky composer] Eirik Suhrke again. I knew we’d be able to expand the sequel the way I imagined with this team,” he adds.

Blitworks, a Spanish studio primarily known for porting indie titles to new platforms, has been working with Yu on the programming side of Spelunky 2’ s development to help bring his vision to life. The sequel, with its expanded scale and suite of new features, was far too ambitious to be tackled as another one-man job, and Yu says the studio’s involvement was “an absolute requirement” for meeting fan expectations.

“I had to know they were on board before spending too much more time thinking about it,” he says. “In order to make a bigger game and let people play online... and do it all in a reasonable timeframe... it definitely required a larger, more experienced team.

This is also the first Spelunky game where I’ve asked another artist to help me with illustrations. Justin Chan’s done an amazing job bringing the characters, world, and story of Spelunky to life.”

Like its predecessor, Spelunky 2 is a game that delights in the unpredictability of its underworld. Yu jokes that there are secrets in the game that even he doesn’t know about, as its emergent, procedurally generated assets are like a periodic table of chemical elements, primed and ready to interact with one another in all manner of unexpected ways, with the player being the most independent variable of them all.

“We’re always sharing crazy things that happen in-game amongst the team, and I can only imagine what’s going to happen when Spelunky 2 is released to the wider world,” teases Yu. “With a roguelike-inspired game, it’s important not to be too strict in your approach to balance, because you can inadvertently remove a lot of fun moments.”

This is also the first Spelunky game where I’ve asked another artist to help me with illustrations.