Ëvën Mörë Brütäl

Here are the three button diagrams from Brütal Legend, superimposed. If you’ve played Brütal Legend, this image is somewhere burned into your cerebellum:

I think there’s an agreement here at Warp Skip! that while the world, audio, and art of Brütal Legend are perfect, the controls and mechanics seem… unpolished. I offer the image above as evidence. They’re not the most complicated controls ever devised for a video game, but they’re more complicated than they need to be.

Double Fine acknowledges Brütal Legend’s problems in this post-mortem. Producer Caroline Esmurdoc pegs the lack of polish the game’s legal troubles, which came to a head late in development. Here’s a quote:

The lawsuit [among Double Fine and Activision and Electronic Arts] was filed just as the game went Alpha, with a stipulation that it be heard prior to Gold Master being submitted—relegating Tim and myself and a cadre of team leaders to the unenviable job of information gathering, declaration writing, lawsuit reading, witness interviewing and all around non-game-making during the crunchiest, most critical time of development. The lawsuit took its toll on the team, on the company, on our product and on our optimism. Wrong, any way you slice it.

A game designer like Tim Schafer having to fend off lawyers during the alpha, instead of iterating game mechanics? Now that’s what I call brutal. Legendarily… brutal.

—Adam

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