Cuphead

• 1. Introduction

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  Cuphead is a run and gun video game whose two creators remortgaged their house to finish it. Brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer ran Studio MDHR, a tiny Canadian indie team, and the game they were building looked like nothing else on the market. Its hero has a cup where his head should be. Its world is drawn by hand in the loose, rubbery style of cartoons from the 1930s. Its bosses are relentless, and players are expected to lose to them again and again. Why would two brothers risk their home on a game this slow and painstaking to make? Where did a cup-headed hero come from? And how did a game this punishing end up among the best-reviewed releases of its year?

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• 2. The Devil's Bargain

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  On Inkwell Isle live two fun-loving brothers, Cuphead and Mugman, who answer to an elder named Elder Kettle. Against his warnings, they wander into the Devil's Casino and start playing craps. A winning streak draws the Devil to their table. He offers them every coin in the house if they win the next roll, and their souls if they lose. Cuphead accepts, and the dice land on snake eyes.

  Facing the loss of their souls, the brothers beg for mercy. The Devil offers a second deal. If they collect the soul contracts of his runaway debtors by midnight the next day, he might spare them. Elder Kettle hears the story at home, then gives the boys a potion that lets them fire energy blasts from their fingers. He also warns that the debtors will not hand over their contracts willingly.

  As the brothers cross the island, Elder Kettle notices them growing stronger and urges them to make the right choice when they meet the Devil. Meanwhile King Dice, the Devil's right-hand man, reports their progress to his boss and says he distrusts their intentions. The Devil answers that he will be ready if they try anything.

  With every contract in hand, the brothers return to the casino, where King Dice blocks the way. Their success has cost him a bet, so he stages a long casino-style battle as revenge. Then comes the Devil himself, who offers the brothers a place at his side if they hand the contracts over. Players who accept see the pair turned into demonic servants, and the game ends on the spot. Players who refuse face an enraged Devil in battle. The brothers burn the contracts and go home, where the former debtors, no longer afraid, honor them as heroes and everyone celebrates.

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• 3. Rubber Hose Roots

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  A Japanese animated propaganda film from 1936 gave the game its strangest image, a character with a teacup for a head. The Moldenhauers copied the idea because they found it so odd, and, in their words, "right away it stuck". Before settling on the cup, they sketched many other heroes, including a kappa in a top hat and figures with a plate or a fork for a head.

  The brothers grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, watching early cartoons on VHS compilations their parents supplied. The influences they name include Disney, Fleischer Studios and the cartoonists Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick and Willard Bowsky. Chad Moldenhauer called Fleischer Studios "the magnetic north of his art style". He especially wanted to capture their "subversive and surrealist" streak.

  Chad had worked in graphic design before the project. He hand-drew the animation and painted the backgrounds in watercolor, then added color in Photoshop. The animation plays at 24 frames per second, the standard rate for American film. Gameplay itself runs at sixty frames per second. Chad saw the small human flaws left in the art as a reaction against the perfectionism of modern pixel art.

  The work drew attention from animation prize judges. Hanna Abi-Hanna and Tina Nawrocki, two of the animators, were each named in a character animation category at the 45th Annie Awards.

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• 4. Boss Fights And Charms

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  Four worlds hold the game's fights, and the last one ends with the Devil, who attacks in three phases. Nearly every level is a boss battle, with a few run and gun stages in between. Each boss comes in simple, regular and expert modes, although the final two bosses have no simple mode. Beating a boss on regular unlocks expert mode for that fight. Some battles put the brothers in aeroplanes and play like a side-scrolling shoot 'em up.

  Porkrind's Emporium is the shop where players spend coins on new weapons and special abilities called Charms. Pink objects can be slapped with a parry, which charges the super meter. That meter appears as five playing cards. Spending one card triggers an enhanced attack shaped by the equipped weapon. Spending all five unleashes a Super Art.

  Three Super Arts exist, one in each of the first three worlds. To earn each, the player enters a mausoleum and parries a horde of ghosts so none reach an urn at the center of the screen.

  After each level, the game awards a grade based on completion time, hit points left, parries landed and super meter use, along with the difficulty. Lives are infinite, and all equipment survives a death.

  In two-player local co-op, a fallen brother can rejoin the fight if his partner parries his soul before it floats off the screen.

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• 5. A Score For Big Band

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  Fifty-one tracks make up the score by Kristofer Maddigan, and every one was performed by jazz and big band musicians. The music was written for a full big band rather than sampled. The studio hired an Ontario jazz musician for the project, and the team chose recording methods that matched the era the game imitates.

  Critics noticed. Brett Makedonski of Destructoid called the jazz soundtrack "similarly fabulous" to the game's 1930s visuals. Joe Skrebels of IGN described the sound work as an "ideal match" for the aesthetics. Several outlets later ranked it among the best video game soundtracks ever made.

  The week of the 14th of September 2019 brought a milestone. The album Selected Tunes from Cuphead topped the Billboard Jazz Albums chart, the first time a video game had done so. The same week it reached number one on the Traditional Jazz chart and number six on the Vinyl chart. The feat earned the game a Guinness World Record for being the first to reach first place on a Billboard chart.

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• 6. Built By Two Brothers

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  Back in 2000, the Moldenhauers tried to make a game in this style and gave up because they lacked the tools. The success of the indie game Super Meat Boy in 2010 convinced them to try again. Development began that year on Microsoft's XNA framework, and in 2014 the team switched to the Unity engine. Chad worked from Oakville, Ontario and Jared from Regina, Saskatchewan.

  Evan Skolnick wrote the game. Jake Clark added animation, and Tony Coculuzzi led the programming. Beyond that small circle, the studio brought in a Romanian developer and a Brooklyn animator. Limited staff against a huge workload was the project's biggest challenge, and the brothers went to great lengths to finish it.

  The Moldenhauers described the game as a "retro game" at heart, valuing play over story. Kill Screen called them "obsessed" with the "animations and exploits and hitboxes" of run and gun design. They revised many details, including how movement feels at platform edges and how long a player stays disabled after a hit. They also dropped the standard damsel in distress plot and gave Cuphead a habit of causing his own trouble.

  The team set a numeric goal as well. Alien Soldier held the Guinness World Record for most boss battles in a run and gun game, with 25. The brothers planned more than 30.

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• 7. Reception And Sales

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  At Microsoft's E3 press event in 2014, Cuphead appeared in a trailer but could not be played, and the game was estimated to be 40 percent complete. Ben Kuchera of Polygon named it one of the five most interesting reveals of the show. He said it "stood out immediately" and that the whole press room reacted to the trailer. In 2015 it won the IGN award for best Xbox One game at E3 and the best indie game prize at the Gamescom 2015 Awards.

  When the game launched, reviewers split over its difficulty. Makedonski found it "tough but fair". Ray Carsillo of EGMNow died 188 times in his playthrough, yet felt motivated to "dig my heels in deeper". Lucas Sullivan of GamesRadar+ wrote that it "stands tall among the best 2D shooters of all time".

  Some critics pushed back. Skrebels called the lack of enemy health bars the game's "smartest" and "most devilish" feature, but he criticized the parry system and the control scheme. Chris Plante of Polygon felt the difficulty "eventually goes too far", and Colm Ahern of VideoGamer.com called the final bosses "a step too far".

  Players kept buying it regardless. More than one million copies sold worldwide in the first two weeks. The total passed four million by July 2019 and five million by the game's second anniversary. By the PlayStation 4 release in July 2020, it had reached 6 million.

  Awards followed. Entertainment Weekly placed it fifth on its list of the best games of 2017. At the 17th Annual NAVGTR Awards it won all six categories it was nominated in, including character design and art direction. At the Giant Bomb awards, the shopkeeper Porkrind finished as runner-up for Best Shopkeeper.

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• 8. Afterlife Of A Cartoon

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  Cuphead reached Windows and Xbox One on the 29th of September 2017. A macOS port followed on the 19th of October 2018, promoted with an animated short called Crisp Apples. The Nintendo Switch version arrived on the 18th of April 2019 after Microsoft approached the team about it. A PlayStation 4 port came on the 28th of July 2020.

  In June 2019, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk announced a version for his company's cars, saying he liked the game. It shipped in September 2019 with Tesla's software version 10, though only the first level was playable.

  The Delicious Last Course, an expansion, was revealed at E3 2018 for a 2019 release. The team pushed it into 2020 to avoid crunch, and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it further. It finally came out on the 30th of June 2022. The story begins when the brothers free the Legendary Chalice from a mausoleum. She summons them to DLC Island and shows off an Astral Cookie that swaps her with whichever brother eats it. Chef Saltbaker has a recipe for a Wondertart that could give her a permanent body, but it needs a living soul baked inside. He kidnaps one of the trio to use it himself. After the brothers defeat him, Ms. Chalice refuses to let anyone sacrifice a soul for her. The expansion sold one million copies in under two weeks.

  The Cuphead Show! premiered on Netflix on the 18th of February 2022. It uses digital animation rather than the pen-and-paper methods of the game. A 13-episode second season followed on the 19th of August 2022, and an 11-episode third season on the 18th of November 2022.

  Commentators credit the game with reviving rubber hose animation in video games. PCGamesN's Anthony McGlynn called it a "standard-bearer" for developers borrowing early 20th-century animation styles. Merchandise grew too. Zara released a Cuphead clothing collection in 2022, and a Japanese physical release in April 2023 carried cover art by Yoshitaka Amano. Dark Horse Comics, meanwhile, has kept the story going in print. Its third graphic novel, Cuphead Volume 3: Colorful Crack-Ups & Chaos, arrived in August 2024.

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