Poppy Playtime Creator on Horror Game Success & "Weaponized Nostalgia"

0:02This is the premier podcast spotlighting people of color. Every week we talk news, what we've been playing, and tell you who's invited to the cookout. Our show is all about talking about gaming through a prism of blackness because we are the culture. Welcome to Bukaku, y 'all. Yo, what up everybody? This is the Spawn to Me podcast with Kahlief Adams. I'm your host, Kahlief Adams. We have a fantastic show for you. If you are not subscribed to our feeds all over the internet, please, please, please make sure you're subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, all the places where you get your wonderful news around video games and culture because we are the culture.

0:45We have a fantastic interview for you for this show, where we're going to be talking to George Kerstick, who is the head of creative over at Mob Entertainment, talking about Poppy Playtime, which is a fantastic horror series that I have been playing and finally getting into after it's been out for a while. And folks have already been saying, Kyle, why have you not been playing this thing? So I'm going to get over to our interview and have it right here for you right now. What's going on everybody in Bricago? This is Khalif here for episode 567 of the Spawn of Me podcast. I'm very excited because we have a gentleman on the show today who I've been really, really looking forward to talking to.

1:23Because I have been digging Poppy Playtime, a game that I have been very excited to check out for a while. Because of course, you all know I'm a big horror fan. So we got to talk about some dope horror games. George Kursick, how are you doing? Senior Director of Creative Development over at Mob Entertainment. How's things going today? How have you been? I am well. Thank you for asking and thank you for having me here. I'm super excited. I know we chatted a little bit earlier before we started, but we both have a common love of both horror and video games and horror games. So I'm excited to get into all that with you.

1:59I am excited because Poppy Playtime is a trip. It is the first question of all questions for an episode like this is, who hurt you? What happened?

2:15When you come into a game scenario like something like this, I am sure when you're like, all right, I want to be a part of this project. You look at it in its totality and you kind of look at the grand scheme and you're like, this is fun and also kind of messed up. What were your first initial kind of, you know, decisions that went into your own mind of saying, I want to work on a project like this? Yeah, well, it spoke to me personally on a lot of levels. And I think that's it goes to kind of the unique world that, you know, Zach and Seth created here with their team of you feel comfortable, but also terrified.

2:57Right. It's something that we've called the mixture of creepy and cute. And we also have this other game pillar about weaponized nostalgia. So it's like there's all this shape language and there's all these themes that speak to comfort and consumerism and being a child and being safe. And then you feather in all of these horror aspects, the opposite of all those. So it's kind of that mixture of of cute and terror. And then also the fact that, you know, in my previous experience, I worked on a few IPs and then I worked at a toy company. So I was like, wow, this mixes everything I love, like horror, toys, you know, animation, video games.

3:47So I was very excited to come on board and help, you know, wrestle this beast that has become Poppy. Yeah, Poppy is pop in, as the kids say, is doing a lot of really great work in that genre, in that space that it occupies. But for the folks who haven't necessarily seen Poppy or been a part of the Poppy universe, I do want to play the season five trailer really quick to give them a little bit of a hint about what they're getting themselves into. So we're going to roll that right about now.

4:22Poppy, come back.

4:27Don't be afraid. They can fix you.

4:33No more games. No more lies.

4:41Let's be scared. Get back. Abby. You. And me.

5:02You're the one they've been talking about. We're not the first to try and take out the prototype. I can see you. Everyone tries, they fail.

5:19He's going to kill them all. But everyone has weakness.

5:29This is our chance. It's you. You're alive. You're running out of time! Five. Four. Three... Two... Ah-ha-ha!

6:16Here you are...

6:48So So, first of all, that is a fantastic trailer. That was really well done. Second of all, definitely for the kids. For all the children out there who are ready to get their early movement towards therapy. This seems like a really great moment for all of them. But, again, I want to congratulate you all because the content has been out for a little bit now. You're getting a lot of great feedback from the fans from it. But I do want to go back a bit, you know, thinking about the kind of origins of the series. You know, the series has been out now for at least, you know, four or five years, you know, starting off from around 2021 or so.

7:32Talk to me a little bit about the time that you've spent with the team and kind of, you know, being a part of the journey here and some of the kind of origins for how this kind of came to be. I think a lot of folks, when you see something like that, you see a very full, full fleshed out kind of, you know, a continuation of a story that had an origin somewhere. And if the folks who haven't jumped in from the beginning are looking to kind of get into that initial space of like the who, what, where is and why is the folks at home, you know, the kind of origin story for what this was. absolutely so when uh zach and seth um you know the founders of mob and also the creators of poppy when they started this project they wanted to make an animated series right and they were inspired by the horror that they grew up with and the things that they grew up with right which my generation and their generation are different but we kind of love the same things and we saw the same things through different filters, right?

8:31So it's like a lot of the things that you see reflected in the game and the world are things that they love and they grew up with, right? So that Toys R Us aesthetic, you know, and some of those horror aspects and some of those, you know, the fact that now there's a genre called mascot horror, right? It's like a lot of Western kids grow up loving mascots, and then you kind of throw them aside as you become an adult, right? You're like, I don't have time for that anymore. So I think that they wanted to express that kind of, you know, leaving those safe things behind and going into the world, which the world does have teeth, right?

9:13And we have to be aware of it. And, you know, it taps into that kind of a fairy tale, you know, mentality, which fairy tales were initially, they're a lot creepier than what has been kind of conveyed to the world, like the original fairy tales. And they were supposed to be warnings like, hey, I want to make sure the kids don't die. So I'm going to tell them about the wolves out there, right? Or whatever it is. So we're kind of, we're tapping into all those things. Yeah, I love the fact that it is pulling on and I love the kind of terminology of weaponizing nostalgia, right? Like I think the idea of what were the kind of almost creepy things that we grew up with that then morphed into now very creepy things within the game and seeing some of those analogs work so well i think what i always come away from anytime i get a chance to to check the world is how well the design for these characters has come to life and how those concepts have then been kind of pushed forward in in these malevolent ways that we don't really get a chance to see that often.

10:16When you talk to the team about what the continuation of that almost visual style that you have all created for this world feels like, you know, you see new characters get introduced in every chapter with more even in the fifth. How are we all thinking about when you're having those discussions about design and about what creeps you all out that will hopefully creep out the audience? What do those sessions feel like and sound like when you're having those discussions about how do we want to creep people out in a world that is already creepy? Well, what's interesting is that the cute and the creep kind of come naturally.

10:57And these meetings are joyous because we have our art folks in there. We have our level designers. We have our narrative folks. And we have our creators, our founders in there. So those are wonderful like blue sky meetings where we're looking at inspiration, we're talking about stuff. We're like, hey, did you guys know that there's a certain kind of visual fear language about rusted stuff underwater, right? So like we're just riffing and going, oh my God, I didn't know I had that fear. Now I have that fear, right? um and we're we're always looking at you know a toyetic aspect because at its core this is a toy company that went wrong right so they're they're looking through the filter of 90s mass consumerism right and it's like how how did that go wrong in this particular world right it's like good intentions or commercial intentions um so we're always looking at that that filter and we're always asking the question of like, okay, what is the particular mob spin on this?

12:04Like we've all seen this trope before, right? Horror is a series of tropes, right? Almost any genre is a series of tropes, but we try to upend them, challenge them, blow them up sometimes, right? And even, you know, mascot horror now is like a whole genre. So we have to make sure that we're not telling the same stories over and over again and doing the same scares and the same gags and the same visual shape language right that's why i think huggy is such a success because i think subconsciously huggy triggers a lot of memories in folks right he's got aspects of of things that we loved or love or feel safe about you know um or feel safe around i should say and then suddenly you see those teeth and you're like this doesn't make sense you have a visceral reaction to it so we're we're trying to you know get you into that zone of safety and comfort and then shatter that glass i love that because i think for horror especially if you're a big horror fan and you've been a horror fan for a long time we have as an audience and as a group we have the toughest of skin when it comes to you know probably what skeeves you out or what freaks you out or what scares you while also being really critical of the idea of the scare, which is like, you know, I think we hold a little bit of pride and maybe you share this feeling too of, well, oh, I saw that thing.

13:31That didn't scare me. It scared you? Oh, that's cool that it scared you. But, you know, I have a little bit of pride because I didn't get scared. There is a little bravado in that sense too, but it feels like a lot of that washes away here because you have so many different layers of storytelling that come across that each one of them has its own visual style of scary. Like you're using full motion video, you're using cartoons, you're using the old kind of VHS aesthetic that harkens back to the time when we grew up in those spaces. What is it like to be able to have a studio be so in tuned and so adept at working with so many different mixed medias?

14:18Because that's really, really hard to do when games these days are struggling with getting one version of that right. How is it to work with so many different versions of that and pull them off so well? That's a wonderful question. Thank you for asking it, actually. So we have a number of very talented teams that are all pushed to the limit, right? And what we try to do is we try to find the most efficient way of conveying horror. And the good thing about horror is the less you see, the more there is of it, right? So we're like, hey, man, like, how can we show this without showing it? Oh, VHS, that's super degraded.

14:58Absolutely. Or it's just a crappy audio file, you know? So horror lends itself to that. But also, you know, we're an indie studio and we have limited time and limited budget. We pretty much put out a game a year. So we have to we have to be efficient. Right. And I think those kinds of boxes. And I'm sure you know, this is like those boxes help creativity. They don't harm it. Right. So we we kind of embrace that. But we have really, really, you know, flexible teams. And the other cool thing is, as I mentioned earlier, we have multiple generations of horror fans. Right. So we get to speak to each other in the same language across different experiences.

15:43Probably for our generation, it was like, what was it? Blair Witch was a huge thing, right? Sure, yeah. And that created a whole aesthetic and it launched a whole genre. But that's like old news for some of our younger devs, right? And they're talking about creepypasta. Or, you know, like just yesterday, they showed me this like one minute horror film. Right. And it's like, that's that's a trend now. And I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. Right. So we're getting to share things. And then I can tell them what it felt like going to see, you know, a rated horror movie when I was not supposed to write the reaction of the crowd.

16:20Yeah. So it's that kind of communal sharing of things that affected us as creative people and storytellers that scared us. Right. That we try to bring to the experience of the game. Ooh, I love that. Because that must be super fun to be able to time travel with each other to be able to kind of get those experiences together. Like for me, I remember very, very, very distinctly that first Blair Witch moment, right? or even what I love that the Poppy Playtime series has kind of engaged with is camp. Camp is a huge part of the vibe too. So I'm a person who loves the Saw series and the Hostel series, but also remembers things like Night of the Creeps or the Hellraiser series.

17:11or you know there's so many you know uh pieces of that puzzle that form your horror identity in some of those ways it's really cool to hear that you all have that that generational uh uh knowledge that's in the space to be able to do that but i love to hear you talk about the the communal part because i think the community usually is a huge driver not only of success for a title like this but you then get into to theory crafting and you get into lore crafting from the audience and you get that initial buy-in from them when you get that that amount of folks who really dig you know the the product that you're sharing what has it been like for the team to now have this thing be a part of the kind of horror ethos in the game space and now kind of moving beyond that in some in some ways that that is another great question and it's one of our our core like uh pillars that we focus on, which is our ongoing communication with the community, right?

18:11We're almost crafting this with them. We always keep them in mind. And we always like to, you know, put out as we call them like hooks for plot to hang on, right? So people are engaged. Also, we don't want to tell you everything like soup to nuts. Like I know that, I know that's like a recently, that's a trend in western storytelling it's like i need the full backstory i need to have full resolution i need to know you know how how he has the magical powers i need everything right and that's fine but you know something that i'm inspired by is more of the eastern storytelling where it's left open to interpretation right and there there's even some excellent horror films from the 70s where you're like, I'm not sure what happened.

19:00But then it triggers your imagination, which your imagination is better than anything we can make, right? Because your imagination has infinite budget and infinite scale. So we want to embrace that, right? So the effort that we go through is to make sure that we are honoring, you know, what has been shipped, what people have emotionally connected to, while at the same time growing things, right? and a recent example of kind of like that open-ended question not giving anything away i'm not sure if you've seen it or if your viewers or listeners have seen it but begonia right yeah which so there at the end there's a lot of questions right and i would argue that's a i would argue that's a horror film some people may not agree but at the end there's like maybe four different paths there that you can take right and i love that and i love that and so we're always trying to find that that balance of just enough to engage people right just to get them thinking um because if you show the creature full-on in broad daylight it it doesn't work um i'll give an example of that something that i use as a reference for us here is and again i loved it i i i'm pretty forgiving about ips but there was the recent um alien earth series which i think there was some like massive highs and massive lows right but i love big swings so i'm in but there was a scene hopefully i'm not giving anything away it's been a few months where you see that the creature you see it full in daylight right and it's like oh no i think you broke the IP.

20:47I think you broke it. So, so we have a core philosophy, which has been doing us well across our expressions in that you never turn the lights on a hundred percent, right? It should always, and that's a thematic core, right? Not just visually expressing, but like, don't tell me everything. Don't show me everything, right? Because in daylight, horror fades, terror fades, imagination dies right so you have to have some darkness around the edge that's so i love to hear you talk about it in that way because that speaks to me so much as a horror fan i was just having a conversation with some friends on another show that we were doing and we were talking about favorite movies in the genre because it had that had that very specific thing and i was like as much as i am no longer a fan of m night's work that signs moment where you're in the hall in in the in the alleyway and you get that quick walkthrough is just such a big moment for what that was and thinking about like you know it feels like now we've spoiled ourselves in so many different ways because we have the after the movie explainer that goes up on youtube that just comes in and like i wanted to figure that out on my own like i want to make my own version of that um i was watching bright burn the other day because i was like oh yeah like I needed an anti-hero superhero movie and did that thing at the end too, where you see all this destruction happening from him, but you don't know what happens to him.

22:19Like he could be, you know, whatever happens at the end. So I love the fact that you talked about it that way because it's such a seminal part of the genre in that way. What I do also love is you've had some real cool success in terms of the actors who have come to be a part of the Playtime series as well. Not only from a brilliant voice and on-screen actor cast that have kind of come through over the years, but you've also had some fun celebrities pop in from time to time to kind of come in and be a part of the action too. Talk to me a little bit about what that process has been. Is it one of those things where folks are like, man, I really love this thing, can I be a part of it?

23:01Or is it a thing where you're like, hey, you would be a really fun person to kind of pull into the project? What's that process kind of been like for you all? It's both, you know, and it's the old like saying, if you know, you know, like certain people do kind of reach out and they're like, hey, you know, is there anything there? And then also we've been reaching out to, you know, more and more folks as we grow, you know, as people actually take our calls, right? We can be like, hey, would you be interested? You know, again, we're still an indie studio, right? Sure, sure, sure. So, yeah, it's wonderful to see the impacts and the IP growing where you can have those conversations, right?

23:42And one of those conversations is, you know, with our film partners, right? So it's like we're starting to have more and more of those conversations. And it feels good because this team and this company has worked so hard. And the thing that I always tried to find, you know, life is short. like i want to work with sincere people and like a sincere company and that's it's getting tougher to find these days and it's like these folks are sincere they care they live breathe and bleed you know these characters and this story and that's why i'm here i just want to support that yeah i i love that because again it feels so like the analog to to what i could my own imagination of how you all would play in that space is infinite.

24:29And especially every time I get a chance to kind of check out the world, I'm like, oh, that would be so fun to see that on a big screen somewhere to be able to see the audience kind of freak out to those parts. I do want to go back a little bit to conversations around the community because I think one thing I did want to ask you is with a game like this that has these very finite chapters that kind of give you the cliffhanger to kind of move to the next space, what has been some of your feedback and reaction or surprises that you've seen from the audience in terms of the way that they've kind of come to the story and have kind of molded it externally?

25:07Because, you know, the feedback will come into the team and teams will take some of it potentially and they take all of it and kind of just figure out what parts fit and what don't. But like, were there any big surprises that you've seen in a time working with them, with the team that has come from the community that you didn't expect that really kind of either affected gameplay or affected the narrative in some really interesting ways. So what I'll say is not surprising because we beat up on our story and our gameplay pretty rigorously. And then also we theorycraft on how is this going to affect the community, right?

25:41So we have, we do that, what is that, Doctor Strange, you know, okay, I saw like 50 different versions of this and only one succeeded. Luckily, you know, more than that succeeded for us. So we have those conversations because again we consider the community a part of dev so usually there's someone or multiple people speaking for the community like hey i think that people will like this or they won't like this or by the way i saw a lot of fan art on this character we're probably gonna have to bring them back right so those are the conversations we have and then what I'll say is not surprised but I thought really kind of rewarding is how you know people reacted to Miss Gracie and some of those those you know those clips of hers that was very rewarding because we went for a very specific thing there right and we were we were mixing again we were mixing like commercialism and like preschool shows you know some of the stuff that we grew up with you know the live action folks telling us abcs and everything's going to be okay and then also like mind control right so you're like so i'm glad that that really resonated it was it's so well done too like it oh man because i was like all right this is this is evil romper room okay i'm fine with yeah yeah yeah you got like evil romper room this is like evil i'll even put in a real deep cut because i'm from the east coast like this is like evil steam pipe alley with mario canton shout out to him if you ever if you ever saw steam pipe alley it was it was an amazing time but it but it felt it feels like you've nailed that part and the team is really pulling those in so i'm happy to hear that you had those really good moments with the team and the audience to really kind of connect those pieces together uh in a big way um i love the fact that this game is so tactile in the way that it is like the from the mechanics of the base part of the game of your hands kind of reaching out and doing things in this first person view has a team ever thought about delving into other kind of creative spaces from a medium perspective from like a vr perspective where you're getting even closer to to to these characters in that way or other versions of of the kind of playtime series that might move into some other spaces that are not the kind of traditional ones that we currently see well actually we we had a uh like a pop-up experience where you can kind of go through a bit of the factory.

28:14I think that they might, it was launched last year and I think they might bring it up again this year. And that was, that was like, I didn't get to go to it, but it was a lot of fun to work on. And what's great is our designers, they're, they so live in the world that when it was physically manifested they were on it they were like hey man this had you know the lights have to be really low and i really need the floor tiles to pop you know and this is the this is the pan tone and i was like oh yeah so so yeah we you know we we've explored already kind of a physical um kind of expression of the factory um and then i know we have some pop-up stores in japan that do a light touch on that and as as nerdy game designers we're always looking at like you know what's another way you know what's what's another way to connect with our audience and those are the you know we're in early days of asking all those questions um at the same time trying to keep you know the game on the rails and and make sure we can deliver the quality that we've we've come to be known for a thousand percent um season five seems like it's doing really well in in the zeitgeist and what folks are kind of talking to you.

29:25How has the vibe been so far from what you've heard from fans of the series about season five? So it's very positive. I think our rating on Steam is very positive. Fans have been overwhelmingly positive. We've gotten some great feedback from the community. We've gotten some great feedback from some streamers, you know, and it's kind of, I know it's broken a few records, like it broke our last year record for the first day sales and then I know that we were on, we were number one on global sales on Steam during launch and you know, number one on Twitch during launch, so for again, for an indie studio, small studio this is huge, right so we're super excited.

30:11Man I'm happy for you all, that makes me very happy to see that a game like this and and the horror genre is getting the the the love and respect that it deserves uh because i always feel like it is that mix-up that that mash-up of i'm too scared to play it but i need to play it which is which is fantastic i love that in the grand scheme um we're almost out of time um and i and i want to thank you for your time but before i let you go i have to ask you know we we've talked a little bit about you know our favorite uh horror spaces what what's what's some of your top favorite horror movies to to kind of dig into when you're when you're feeling like i need my i need my fix i need my horror yeah what's what's your what's your movies of choice yeah you were just telling me about your like comfort food horror fix so um i really dig um is it beneath the black rainbow i don't know if you've seen that one that's like super liminal um and then that director also did mandy which is a little more extreme right um and uh so there's a there's an old sci-fi film from the 70s a soviet sci-fi film which i consider horror um and that is my go-to uh which is it's called stalker yeah and the the video games were based on it etc but like every time you watch it it's a different film and you bring the horror to it, right?