How RiffTrax Made a Video Game (Part 1)

Hello there Traxians!

If you don’t know me, my name is Peter Hunter, and I’ve been working at RiffTrax since July 2016 handling the digital marketing duties for the company. A lot of this past year, however, I’ve been working as a producer for a (previously) secret project for RiffTrax. By now you’ve probably seen the big announcement: RiffTrax just released a video game! I wanted to give you Traxians some insight as to how we got here, and what the process has been like behind the scenes.

In 2021, we opted not to do a Kickstarter. Like the rest of the world, we really weren’t certain what the next year would bring, plus we still needed to perform the shows promised from our 2020 campaign. However, that wasn’t always the plan. We pitched a variety of things internally to try on Kickstarter that year. A lot of ideas got tossed around (which I won’t list here in case we end up doing them some day), but  we never really settled on anything. Ultimately, we decided to wait and see. Though, one idea came up more than a few times: maybe we should try making a game. We weren’t sure if it would be a card game, board game, or video game – or even how we would begin to pull that off.

Cut to: March 12, 2021.

I have several Google alerts configured to shoot me an email if an article/video is published on topics related to movie riffing. It mostly feeds me coverage of RiffTrax, or pieces about bad movies. After all, if the director of Feeders is making an Amityville Horror film set in space, RiffTrax should probably know about it. In my daily wading through these alerts, a headline caught my eye:

After watching the trailer a few times, I quickly recognized movies and shorts we had tackled before, like Killers From Space and Manners In School. It sort of felt like this could be a RiffTrax game.

Then the question of how exactly to approach this arose. I had some experience in the games industry, having previously worked as an independent developer, and at the charity-forward storefront Humble Bundle, so I had some idea of the production burden, and frankly, the costs involved in developing a game. How could we make this happen?

Fast forward to April 8th, 2021.

They were fans! Not only had they made a game that we kind of saw a little bit of RiffTrax in, but as it turned out: they were fans of ours! Whatever hurdles there might be, I could tell these developers would be just as excited about making a RiffTrax game as we would be. That’s what finally drove us to reach out to the developers of What The Dub?!, Wide Right Interactive.

See folks, sometimes tweeting can be a good thing!

A quick email exchange reinforced what I had already suspected. They even went so far as to mention how often they streamed our Twitch channel during the development of their previous two games. Before long, the discussion turned toward a RiffTrax game and... things sort of snowballed from there!

We'll have more about the process behind making the game in the coming weeks, but I just wanted to give you a little insight into how things got kicked off. We're incredibly happy with how the game's turned out and we can't wait for y'all to play it! 

I'll leave you with this: our test version of the game when we first started making test builds in Steam, which we named in such a way as to keep it a secret! 

See you soon for Part 2! 

-Peter

P.S. This has been a ton of fun but also a TON of work. Check it out on Steam and consoles here and if you do play it, consider leaving us a review to help others discover it. Thanks!

[Erik chimes in]

 Hi folks! No Turkey Thursday today, because Peter and I will be participating in our Twitch premiere of RiffTrax: The Game along with Mike, Kevin, Bill, Conor, Sean, and Bridget! I hope you'll come join us and be part of the audience, where you can vote for your favorite riff. P.S. Would you be interested in some Patreon-only rounds of the game? Let me know in the comments!