“Bible Adventures was the big one we got – I think that might have been the very first one we even tried to get. We’re big fans of it here – there’s a book by Gabe Durham that’s all about the history of that game and its developer, Wisdom Tree, and how they skirted the law to sell bootleg NES carts. It’s such a crazy story, and it’s an honor to feature the game here. I won’t spoil the other ones, but Bible Adventures does get featured hugely in the game during [a boss fight]. I’m really proud of that part – it took a lot of work and we did it just because it made us laugh and seemed like an insane thing to commit to.”
But alongside the jokes that come with huge amounts of planning, there are also ones that sprung up by chance – game development’s “improv”, perhaps. Throughout a creative process there will no doubt be surprises along the way, elements you had not expected, or chances to take that just happen to work out. In the case of High On Life 2, that came in the form of the tutorial to help get you on the new skateboard for the first time.
“It’s very early on in the game, and to teach the player how to use their new skateboard we have Gene look up a video online, and he shows it to you,” Robbins tells me. “The video is just something I shot with my friend Jon Millstein, a skater and comedian, with my phone in a parking lot near the Los Angeles Zoo. I wrote this long monologue for Jon to read, full of specific game controls and instructions, and he memorized it nearly on the spot in an alien mask. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game and it came together quickly on the cheap, at the last minute. We shot it in an hour, I went home and edited it that night, and by the next day it was already in the game. That’s the Squanch magic!”
This “magic” is what holds the ambitiously hilarious High On Life 2 together, through crisp writing, creative gameplay (skateboards!), and an incredibly immersive world for us to explore. It’s developed with a swagger, confident that their sense of humor will resonate with enough of us to take even bigger swings at turning “fun to play” into “funny.” High On Life 2 is about to show us what can happen when a group of creative game developers craft something that’s centered around a singular purpose: To make us laugh our asses off.
