Superbrothers: Sword & Swocery EP

Super­broth­ers: Sword & Swo­cery EP is home to the col­lab­or­at­ive work of Super­broth­ers, Jim Guthrie, and Capy. They’re work­ing on a game together and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty inter­ested in what it will be like. To explain to you just why I’m inter­ested I’m going to have to break it down.

Super­broth­ers
The first I heard about Super­broth­ers was when art and design blogs flipped their shit for their videos, and rightly so. Embed­ded below is my favour­ite of these: Dot Mat­rix Revolution.

People have described their style in many ways: “gor­geous”, “beau­ti­ful”, “8-bit”, “pixelated”, and “lame” But per­son­ally I think Jim Guthrie summed it up best with “eye­gasm indu­cing”, and may I just add “sin­is­ter”. Their first video — The Chil­dren Of the Clone — in which “a single exec­ut­ive recruits an army of clones to attack, behead and ‘incor­por­ate’ an old money indus­tri­al­ist into their con­sumptive sys­tem” is more out­wardly sin­is­ter, but I was struck by Dot Mat­rix Revolu­tion. The awk­ward dan­cing of the two Soft­ware Engin­eers, the steady encroach­ment of the tech­no­logy before it explodes with the advent of the inter­net, the col­ours, and the soundtrack by Jim Guthrie doesn’t help mat­ters. Which brings us to the next section.

Jim Guthrie
Jim Guthrie — a Juno Award nom­inee and col­lab­or­ator of The Hid­den Cam­eras, Arcade Fire, Islands and more — is another tal­en­ted Cana­dian. Ori­gin­ally mak­ing a name for him­self through com­pos­ing his songs on a Play­Sta­tion, his haunt­ing and sparse yet pretty arrange­ments are sure to add to the game. He’s doing some shows at the end of the month, so make sure you check him out (some­thing that I — unfor­tu­nately — can’t do, being 3325 miles away from Toronto).

Capy
Cred­ited on the Super­broth­ers web­site under “engin­eer­ing and mir­acles” Capy also hap­pen to be the cre­at­ors of my favour­ite game that I’ve never bought (I’ll get around to it one day I prom­ise): Crit­ter Crunch. Aptly described by Brandon Boyer with “like Ghibli barf­ing rain­bows” it also hap­pens to be addict­ively fun. Also recently they have pro­duced Might And Magic: Clash Of Her­oes, a game that has received solidly great reviews.

The Game
Which brings us to Sword & Swor­cery itself. The graph­ics are by Super­broth­ers, the sound by Jim Guthrie and the engin­eer­ing by Capy. I know next to noth­ing other than some lucky mem­bers of Toronto’s Hand Eye Soci­ety got a 10 minute sneak-peek of the game, com­ing soon to iPhone and iPod Touch. Hav­ing man­aged to get a peek of that devel­op­ment foot­age (appar­ently the game was less than 25% com­plete) myself, I can hon­estly say I’m look­ing for­ward to it. The game is appar­ently broken up into two parts, Sword: a “musical com­bat type thing”, and Swo­cery: a “stream­lined approach to adven­ture and exploration”.

To find out where they go from here you can sub­scribe to their rss feed, Tele­tex or Twit­ter. Make sure to keep a close eye on them in the com­ing months as this game starts to come together.