BEHIND THE SCENES
A Great Dumb South Park Idea
South Park: Phone Destroyer™
Fight epic real-time battles!
The day Trey Parker met his South Park and Book of Mormon cocreator Matt Stone—a moment that would forever impact animation, TV comedy, musical theater, and the very concept of social commentary—they, uh, sat around and played videogames at Trey’s parents’ house.
It was the 1990s. The Parkers had just bought a new computer and the guys had a fresh copy of Doom, which Trey believed represented the apex of human videogame achievement.
“I remember telling Matt, there’s this new game, and there’s no further games can go,” he says. “It’s just real. This is it. This is virtual reality.”
As it turned out, games went quite a bit further—from vast fantasies to immersive MMOs to games in which you knock over towers with birds. In fact they went all the way up to South Park: Phone Destroyer, the Ubisoft-built mobile game that transports the show’s comically diabolical characters and dialogue to a frenetic card-battle universe.
Their creative challenge: Be accessible enough for a mass gaming audience but cheeky enough to remain South Park.
“We said, this can’t just be a walk-around-South-Park-and-collect-coins game,” Parker recalls, “especially because that’s exactly what we make fun of.”
In the game they dreamed up, you star as New Kid, a newcomer to South Park, helping Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny, and a cast of background characters fight one another. In a new update, pranksters Terrance & Phillip join the mayhem. (A separate single-player mode takes you through a narrative story.) “You don’t ever play Cartman or Stan or Kenny,” Stone says. “You play yourself.”
That construct solved the problem of presenting something new to South Park’s fan base while leaning on the characters they’ve come to know over 20 years. “In the mobile game, we’re more likely to use characters and interactions we’ve used already in the show,” Stone says. “We’ve set the table with these characters.”
As with any South Park episode or movie, the game has a narrative plot with a beginning, middle, and end—bucking the current trend toward infinite gameplay.
South Park: Phone Destroyer engages players in a lively and colourful series of street battles designed to reveal familiar faces (gradually) and Cartman-grade insults (constantly).
“We thought a lot about tone from the beginning,” Stone says. “It wasn’t about age or demographic or anything. When you’re dealing with social commentary around race or politics, you have to do it right. We can put out a show and it is what it is, but those same jokes or topics might not work on a phone without any sound while you’re playing on a subway.”
The pace required to simultaneously pull off the game and the show (not to mention The Book of Mormon, which continues to tour) has been brisk bordering on frantic. But creative multitasking is nothing new to these guys.
“We’re all about getting a dumb idea, something that sounds totally stupid—and then we do it,” Parker says. “When people heard we were doing a stage musical, they said, why are you wasting your precious time? They couldn’t believe it.”
Stone waits a beat. “So we just need to come up with some more stupid ideas.”