the most striking thing about the game is how it looks. It’s a game that tries to capture the surreality inherent in cartoons from the ‘30s, like Betty Boop or Steamboat Willie. Enemies in the game include a towering cigar with a sinister grin, and a giant carrot with psychic powers. There are also plenty of sight gags, like a fish going fishing, or a coin who doesn’t trust banks. And, of course, the main character in Cuphead is, well, a guy a with a cup for a head.

Capturing that style — and doing it in a way that both looked and felt authentic — required a lot of work. It meant utilizing most of the same techniques that gave early Disney and Fleischer Studios cartoons their distinct look. The backgrounds in the game consist of watercolor paintings, while every frame of animation was hand-drawn on paper, before being inked and ultimately inserted into the game. The only part of the process that was digital was the coloring. “When we did our tests at the beginning, we hand-painted each cell and then we colored it digitally, and we did a comparison,” explains Moldenhauer. “There really was no difference. So that’s why we took the easy path.” Development on Cuphead started in 2010, and it was first revealed back in 2014. At that point it was a considerably smaller game. In order to be realistic about what they could actually create, the team at Studio MDHR scaled back their vision to an experience that would consist entirely of a series of eight Mega Man-style boss battles. At the time, the studio consisted of just three people, making it a challenge to create anything larger than that, especially considering the time-consuming nature of the art style.