BEHIND THE SCENES
This South Park game is a ‘dumb idea’
South Park: Phone Destroyer™
Fight epic real-time battles!
The day Trey Parker met South Park and Book of Mormon co-creator Matt Stone – a moment that changed animation, comedy and musical theatre forever – they…uh, sat around playing videogames.
It was the ’90s. The Parkers had just bought a new computer and the boys had a copy of Doom, which Trey believed to represent the apex of 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 adventures to online worlds to games in which you knock over towers with birds. And now we’re at South Park: Phone Destroyer, a game which takes the show’s cast of characters and places them into tactical card-based battles.
Trey and Matt challenged themselves to make a game 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 Phone Destroyer, you star as New Kid, a – wait for it – new kid in South Park. You help Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny and a cast of background characters fight each other by playing different cards at the right times and in the right situations.
A single-player mode takes players through a story with a beginning, middle, and end – engaging players in a lively series of street battles designed to reveal familiar faces (gradually) and Cartman-grade insults (constantly).
Stone and Parker ensure that an episode of their TV show can spring to life in less than one week; the game is being updated with new content regularly too. (“The world keeps inventing new things for us to talk about,” Stone says.)
“We thought a lot about tone from the beginning,” he continues. “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.”
The workload to simultaneously pull off the game and the show (while The Book of Mormon tours North America) has been brisk, to say the least. But frantic creative multitasking is nothing new to the duo.
“We’re all about getting a dumb idea, something that sounds totally stupid – and then we do it,” Parker adds. “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.”