Musclecat Showdown

With a collaboration with Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi already under our belt, Wild Rumpus and I decided we’d try to put together another dream-team to make a game for the 2014 iteration of our Game Developers Conference party.

This time, Wild Rumpus’s Marie Foulston suggested we reach out to Natasha Allegri, former Adventure Time animator who had just announced her own new animation series, Bee & Puppycat.

As with Keita, Natasha very happily jumped at the chance, and so I paired her off with Major Bueno, the German indie team who had proven they could work fast and amazing by completing a new game each month for the entire year prior, and whose designer, Marius Winter, had cut his teeth at Double Fine.

This time, I went to the team with a pitch that I’d hoped could kickstart the collaboration. In late 2012, Natasha had spent two full hours on a quick-sketch tweet-storm of cat drawings, specifically cats in increasingly ostentatious and salacious poses. What if, I suggested, we put together a game where players competed to strike the sexiest imaginable cat-pose? Natasha and Marius took that lump of clay and pressed it into a gem, and so was born Musclecat Showdown.

The goal of Showdown is to resolve a playground dispute not with a direct after-school confrontation, but by issuing rapid-fire commands to your egomaniacal cat to have them strike particular poses. Pose wrong and you get the spray-bottle, pose correctly and the assembled crowd boosts your meter to determine the winner at the end of the round.

Rounding off the package, Musclecat Showdown is played with two fur-wrapped and quasi-anatomically-correct controllers, devised by Wild Rumpus’s Alice O’Connor (and an additional Texas-local set created by Jo Lammert).

The musclecats have been exhibited at a few different locations, but, like Tenya Wanya still have yet to appear in a commercial package, something all of us involved hope to rectify soon.