What you need to know
- Double Fine Productions, the creators of Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Grim Fandango, have shared a blog post looking at the behind-the-scenes history of Brütal Legend in honor of its 15th anniversary.
- Double Fine Productions has also stated within the blog post that many of its developers have been considering making a sequel to Brütal Legend.
- Brütal Legend is an action-adventure/strategy game hybrid released in 2009. It follows the adventures of Eddie Riggs, the roadie, as he leads an army of heavy metal revolutionaries to free the Brütal Land from the clutches of evil demons.
On October 13, 2024, Double Fine Productions’ cult-classic love letter to all things Heavy Metal, Brütal Legend, celebrated its 15th anniversary after being released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2009.
To celebrate this milestone, Double Fine Productions’ community manager, Harper Jay MacIntyre, has put together a blog post on its official website detailing the history of this action-adventure/strategy game hybrid, along with interviews from the developers, including the studio’s founder, Tim Schafer.
If you grew up playing Brütal Legend like I did back in the late 2000’s, this blog post is a fascinating read. It goes on to describe how the game’s general concepts were inspired by Tim Schafer’s love for classic Heavy Metal music and movies such as Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and the lengths the art team went to create a world that felt like a heavy album cover come to life.
In addition, the blog also details how the game was always intended to have real-time strategy elements since its inception (with game mechanics inspired by a cult SEGA Genesis game called Herzog Zwei), the way game pivoted towards having single-player action-adventure elements during development at the behest of the game’s original publisher Vivendi, and how it got various rockstars like Jack Black, Ozzy Osborne, and the late great Lemmy Kilmister to do voice work for the project.
By far the most interesting topic of discussion is when Harper brought up the possibility of a sequel as die-hard fans have begging for Brütal Legend 2 for over a decade.
It’s one of Double Fine’s best-selling games and the one that people ask me about most. When is Brütal Legend 2!? When! Harper, please! And while that’s not in the card for now, it’s certainly a universe many folks here at the studio wonder about returning to.
Harper then goes on to describe that the dev team had DLC expansion ideas for the original game, how if Tim Schafer wanted to do a sequel, he would like to keep the RTS elements of Brütal Legend 1 instead of making it solely an action-adventure game, and how one of the programmers, Chad Dawson even came with potentially of making a Brütal Legend 2 an RPG, a full RTS, or even an auto-battler.
“People ask about Brütal Legend 2 all the time and I’m torn about that,” Tim told me. “I know some of them want it with an evolution of the RTS stuff and some of them just want God of War with Eddie Riggs. I understand the logic of making the second option, but I’m much more excited about the first.”
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If Psychonauts can get a sequel, so can Brütal Legend.
As a child who spent their youth listening to the rocking tunes of Metallica, Motorhead, and Iron Maiden, I loved playing Brütal Legend when it first came in 2009. The world’s heavy album cover art direction was insane; the characters were outrageously cool, and the combat, while being rough around the edges, was satisfying once mastered (nothing beats melting demon faces while playing guitar solos).
I even revisited Brütal Legend in 2021 in preparation for Psychonauts 2 and I still feel it holds to a large degree today despite the comprises the game had to make during development. While I prefer the action-adventure aspects over the RTS mechanics due to game balancing, I can respect Tim Schafer’s vision of keeping them in for a potential sequel, as it does help it stand out from the crowd. If they did a sequel, they could refine the RTS mechanics and marry them more intuitively with the hack ‘n slash combat system and open-world world exploration.
Ever since Double Fine Productions became a part of Xbox Game Studios, the studio enjoyed greater degrees of creative freedom and higher budgets to play with than it ever did under Vivendi and EA, which helped it create Psychonauts 2, one of the best Xbox games I have ever played. If Psychonauts can get a next-gen sequel with a big budget, then Brütal Legend deserves one as well because this land of metal is rife with potential that deserves to be explored further, no matter what genre it tackles next. I know I would kill to play a Brütal Legend RPG spin-off at least (preferably with turn-based combat), as Chad Dawson suggested.
