VINYL FANTASY
March 24 this year marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. A collaboration between artist Craig D Adams - Superbrothers himself - musician Jim Guthrie and Capybara Games, this moody, offbeat adventure was conceived as “an album you can walk through”. Blending elements of point-and-click and The Legend Of Zelda with a dark fantasy aesthetic and playful writing, Sworcery was a defining moment in mobile and indie games - yet there’s been nothing quite like it since. With Superbrothers giving us an exclusive look at its long-gestating follow-up Jett: The Far Shore, we took the opportunity to speak to the original team - Adams and co-writer/director/ producer Kris Piotrowski, Guthrie and former Capy president and executive producer Nathan Vella - to discuss the history, development and legacy of this remarkable game.
Artist Craig D Adams first started listening to fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie when he bought his 2002 album Morning Noon Night. Guthrie’s second release on independent label Three Gut Records, it featured a number of tracks created using MTV Music Generator on the original PlayStation. Adams, who’d already had his distinctive pixel art published in magazines, sent out a series of mailers to various art directors, and passed some of his work to Guthrie’s label. In return, Guthrie sent Adams a CD of unreleased tracks, including one called Under A Tree, a song that would later become a centrepiece of Sworcery.
For each song I was like, ‘How would I do justice to this song? How can I make a music video to this song?’ For Under A Tree, I [imagined] a certain colour palette and a flow to it. It sounded to me like walking in the woods, you know, in a kind of pink pre-dawn. Eventually, I settled on one of Jim’s songs to dig in on - a song called Children Of The Clone, which starts with this one [recurring] note, and then through this MTV Music Generator it becomes this whole awesome, nightmarish composition. And so I just kind of put my head down and hand-animated a music video using this pixel program. It was pretty desperate in terms of the level of technology - I would press play on my Discman and then press play on my laptop and see how they went. And then, yeah, Jim and I would have met at that time - ’05, I guess? It was all pretty local stuff. I was working downtown Toronto at this Japanese videogame developer [the now-defunct Koei Canada], Jim’s house is two blocks north, Capy two blocks west. And we basically roped Jim into this archaic.
