Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course is here, the long-awaited DLC for the brilliant Cuphead. Ahead of the launch we sat down with Chad and Jared Moldenhauer of Studio MDHR to talk about its almost five-year journey, what goes into creating Cuphead's animated look, and what’s next for the team.

A snippet.

With Cuphead and The Delicious Last Course having this close relationship and love of traditional hand drawn animation from the 1930s, and the jazz music, you've also got the challenging run and gun or even bullet-hell style of videogame. It's a strange blend and mash-up, old timey animation and hardcore, challenging, gameplay from like the 1980s or 1990s. How do you marry those two things together?

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Chad Moldenhauer: A lot of it actually marries itself, beautifully too. Let me take a step back, the first thing we wanted to do was make a game that we really loved and use a style that we really loved, knowing full well that we would be working on this day in and day out. Once we started digging into the cartoons of that era, we noticed that they relied heavily on loops, had this bouncy animation, and off the wall creative ideas. A character doesn't throw a punch, their hand turns into a giant anvil and that anvil bites the other character. All of that actually pointed to merging that style of cartoon with a game like this. All of the things they used in those cartoons are similar to the things that we're using in the game.

Jared Moldenhauer: On top of that there's parallels with retro gaming. There was something about the 1980s, including movies, where it felt like any idea was open. Something like Stinger (TwinBee 2), you're flying a ship with two boxing gloves, you're fighting coat hangers and a water tap and a giant space melon. The insanity that was coming from early videogames merges with what early animation. There are no rules, your creativity is the only thing that's holding you back. Any inanimate object can be a character, including one with a cup for a head.

Also, when you played old games, you almost applied art on top of the pixels. You were looking at a pixel game, but as a child, that's not pixel Mickey Mouse, that's Mickey Mouse. For us it was, why don't we see if we can actually make a game exactly like a cartoon, where what you saw when you were younger was actually true on the screen. Of course there are a few road bumps where that much animation needs more planning, you have to be aware of how many frames an attack is or an idle cycle is because something small might be 800 frames of animation. In a retro landscape, that's a pixel squid that will slide around the screen.

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