You've made Live Arcade's top-selling game and earned millions of fans — now what's your next move? The lovable minds at The Behemoth talk 2D gaming, life in a "dysfunctional family," and whether the tiny team will ever make Castle Crashers 2.

Here in Consoleland, it’s easy to equate size — big budget, giant dev team — with the success of your game. But don’t tell that to The Behemoth. With just 12 staff members, the studio released the fairly successful Alien Hominid (2004), then followed with a wicked uppercut: 2008 blockbuster Castle Crashers, which, at 2 million downloads and counting, remains XBLA’s highest-selling game to date.

To their many hardcore fans, The Behemoth are the friendliest of idols: team members regularly demo the studio’s games at PAX, Comic-Con, and other open-to-the-public conventions. They also appear prominently on social media, YouTube, and their own blog. Conversely, the company seems surprisingly press-shy compared to some email-spamming studios, seeking press coverage only when a new game is nearing release. All of which made us more determined to learn exactly what’s going on at Behemoth’s small San Diego headquarters.

Once they agreed to join us for a little round-table chat, the answers flowed like giant-catfish drool.

OXM: Let’s start you off easy. What makes a Behemoth game a Behemoth game?

Aaron Jungjohann (BattleBlock Theater Level Designer, QA wizard): Letting players interact is a big part of it, whether you’re teaming up with friend or stranger, son or daughter.
Kelly Revak (“Mayor of Behemothtown,” a.k.a. Marketing/PR): There’s a certain personality to our games that is undeniable. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Aaron: But we tend to take the ridiculous totally seriously. The subject matter is always totally out there, bizarre and whimsical, and carried out in a dramatic, epic, over-the-top kind of way.

OXM: Conversely, what’s something a Behemoth game will NEVER do?

Aaron: People often ask us about sequels, and that’s something we don’t really like to do.
Kelly: Mostly because it keeps us from working on the next project.
Emil Ayoubkhan (Project Manager): In general, “twoquilization” is a dangerous game to get into.

OXM: How so?

Emil: Well, you start going down the path of expectation: “Will there be a three, a four, a five…?”
Dan Paladin (Artist/Studio Co-founder): And how does the new one compare to the last game?
Aaron: And then you’re almost competing with yourself. After all, if we’d done Alien Hominid 2, Castle Crashers would never have existed.

OXM: And Castle Crashers — a game that’s download-only — has sold more than 2 million copies on Xbox 360. That’s intense.

Kelly: It currently has the most players of any Xbox Live title.
Emil: We were head-to-head with Uno for a long time. Uno, which comes free with a lot of Xboxes.
Dan: Uno was our hard-fought nemesis for the last three years. Then the gap closed and we eventually defeated them. I’m pretty sure they had no idea who we were.
Kelly: Take that, Uno!

OXM: So given Castle Crashers’ incredible sales, you MUST be tempted to do another one…

Emil: [Laughter] Our expectations for Castle Crashers weren’t that it was going to sell really well. We weren’t thinking, “If it sells this many units, we’ll do a sequel.” It was more like, “Oh, it did well, let’s move on to the next project.”

OXM: Is that what you’re getting at, then — that it’s more fulfilling for all of you to do something different?

Dan: Absolutely. Castle Crashers basically did what [programmer Tom Fulp and I] wanted it to do — it recaptured the feeling of old beat-’em-ups like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons. Now that we’ve done that, there’s no real motivation to do it again. We’ve had ideas for what would be in Castle Crashers 2 if we were to do it, but it’s not all that appealing when you have another genre that also could be advanced. The decision becomes easier, too, when you think about the fact that you’ve worked on a game for four years and would be working on a sequel for another four years. I’d rather not spend almost a decade of my life with one set of characters.

OXM: So, your studio size definitely factors in here, in that you’re working on a game for several years?

Dan: Right, and it’s not like I’m bored of Castle Crashers: I still like the game and the characters. I just feel like there’s not much new ground to break with that genre, the way there is with platforming.

OXM: Do you mean like with the game you’re working on now, BattleBlock Theater?

Dan: Yeah, I feel like BattleBlock has more to offer in general. Hopefully, players agree. BattleBlock is so different that I think the biggest challenge is just to show the game and encourage people to get to know how it plays. With Castle Crashers, most people have played a game like it before, so they get it immediately. With BattleBlock, on the other hand, I honestly can’t recall playing anything quite like it, and that’s how players seem to react, too. And that’s one of the really awesome points and scary points about it — that there’s no familiarity. But its base mechanics are super-familiar, so it’s really inviting and easy to pick up.

OXM: Has that lack of instant recognizability tempted you guys to make BattleBlock feel more “familiar” to players?

Dan: Well, it’s already very accessible, and we’d never want to rework things that don’t need to be reworked just so the game feels more like other games. I have faith that if people try it, they’ll really enjoy it. Is it a sidescroller? A platformer? Yes and no. Mainly, it’s just its own thing, and to us, that’s really cool.

OXM: Looking outward for a moment, what are some non-Behemoth games you guys admire?

Dan: Anybody who’s doing something that’s simple and 2D. The gaming industry reached a turning point when everyone went to 3D; there was nothing wrong with 2D, but it was abandoned, along with all of these [gameplay principles] that’d existed for decades. Anyone who’s revisiting the old genres is achieving what we’re doing in some sense.
Aaron: There’s a tightness and an immediacy to 2D games…they’re not as cumbersome, not as [burdened] with all of the modern features.
Dan: I’d say Super Meat Boy, which embraces how completely brutal games used to be. I guess we have a more modern take and make our games a little more accessible, but we don’t mind brutal either; Alien Hominid was pretty brutal.

OXM: It was also pretty funny, which leads us to another topic: humor. Everyone always talks about how hard it is to make games funny, but both Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers cracked us up. How do you guys handle comedy in your games, and what are some pitfalls to avoid?

Emil: A lot of times when developers try to do humor and it doesn’t work out, the creators are winking at the audience and laughing at their own joke and using in-jokes. Our style’s more about having something silly onscreen and doing it completely straight-faced.
Kelly: Instead of trying to predict what other people will find funny, we just put in stuff that makes us laugh.
Dan: For instance, everyone always asks about the poop jokes in Castle Crashers. They’re really just there because I was slap-happy and I know I can make [programmer Tom Fulp] laugh with that stuff. First I made the owl and I saw how hard Tom laughed when he was implementing it, and then came the deer, and the rest is history. It’s really just because we work these super-crazy late hours and we lose our minds. Only, we tend to keep those moments rather than cut them, since we don’t have a publisher to say “Hey guys, you’re being totally ridiculous.” We just have the thing that says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if...”
Aaron: There’s no filter.

OXM: What are some of the challenges of being a small indie studio? Some of the rewards?

Dan: At a larger developer, whole teams might be doing something one of us is doing here, so each of us has to do a lot more stuff. But the advantage of that is, we’re responsible for every single thing — art, management — in every single way. It’s more cohesive. I think having all of us essentially be “co-producers” gives our games more personality because each person is overlooking an entire segment, and it shows through.
Ian Moreno (BattleBlock Theater QA Lead, Level Design): One of the rewards of our setup is that we have no publisher, no people watching over us: we get to keep doing what we want to do without someone telling us it’s wrong or not marketable or not for the right demographic.
Kelly: And we own all of our intellectual properties, so if we want to make a toy out of it, we don’t need permission from anyone. We don’t have to jump through hoops: we can just do it.

OXM: Does that mean you guys feel more free?

Ian: As clichéd as it sounds, it’s creative freedom — a dynamic environment that allows for cool things to happen that might not have otherwise happened. We don’t set limits when we’re doing what we do.
Dan: Basically as an artist, if I were to go to most other studios right now, I’d become part of a pipeline where I have to create exact things for another person, brought up by someone else that I don’t necessarily have an interest in, and create something that’s only part of something else. Whereas here, I’m free to pretty much do whatever I want. So being small and independent, you get your soul back, basically.
When we started the company we knew we wanted to make our own stuff. We didn’t want to lose our jobs to something that’s completely out of our control. It didn’t have anything to do with our quality of work or anything; it was just that we were part of the big machine. I’m not saying that all of these other developers are part of this soulless machine. It’s just that I’m sure a lot of them would like to be in our position, where they could choose which creative decisions they get to make. I still liked being a developer at other places, but I really think this is so much better — I would never want to go back to doing it another way.

OXM: Do you feel like a family?

Dan: A very dysfunctional family, yeah.
Kelly: I guess I’d be the mom.
Dan: Some of the guys have been working here for eight years, and a lot of us, we see each other more than our families. We know each other’s every nuance, how they’ll react. All of which makes it even easier to make a game the next time around.

OXM: Reaching out to the community and your fans seems really important to you guys. What’s your philosophy there, what are your goals, and do you think you’ve succeeded in that respect?

Kelly: It’s definitely very important to us. We have our own forums, Facebook pages, Twitter, development blogs, YouTube — we’re all over the place. But our goal is just to have a dialogue between players and developers. So we try to take them behind-the-scenes as we’re developing stuff and get feedback and respond to as much as we can. We pay attention to what people are saying, and I think it helps us make better games because we know what they like and don’t like.

OXM: Do you feel connected to the people playing your games?

Kelly: Yeah, and I’d love them to feel connected to us. We want to have a community of people interested in the project who can feel personally linked to us, allowing open communication between us and them.
Dan: And people don’t hold back. They’ll tell you Alien Hominid is too hard and that kind of stuff. We adjust things based on the overall feedback we get each time, and that makes the community very important. They’re basically one big team member, letting us know how well we’re doing. Every time we bring a game to a trade show, it’s like a giant playtest.
Kelly: I feel like a lot of companies are very one-sided in communicating with fans. They’ll tell you what they’re working on, and maybe have some contests, but they aren’t really listening.

OXM: So how do you measure your success, then? Number of Facebook friends?

Kelly: Not just by numbers of people, but by how involved they are. Like, it doesn’t matter how many fans we have if we’re not talking to them and vice versa.
Dan: And enthusiasm’s important, too — [like] the drawings on our fridge that’ve been sent in by kids who are probably 5 or 6. Fan art, fan stories — that kind of thing is pretty awesome. When people are taking time not just to play your game, but also to create hand puppets or other homemade stuff and send it to you with a handwritten note, that feels pretty good.

OXM: For a small operation, you sell tons of side products — Castle Crashers figurines, BattleBlock T-shirts, and such. That’s impressive.

Kelly: The merchandise is all stuff we wanted to have for ourselves.
Dan: Looking at merch and community, the Pink Knight is a perfect example of that. We sometimes call it the “Community Knight” internally because the Pink Knight was born out of the community — the myth got so big that people began expecting it from us. We’d never even created a Pink Knight.

OXM: Who made it up?

Dan: It’s hard to say who because it just kind of came out of nowhere, but it might have originated with a Flash game called Castle Crashing the Beard (www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/429765), which let you play as a pink knight.
Ian: It’s just the fact that this fictional thing not only turned into DLC, but also a toy. And all of our proceeds for the Pink Knight DLC [available on PlayStation Network now; coming to Live Arcade soon] will go to breast-cancer research.
Kelly: For a lot of our DLC stuff, we like to do things like that, donating to charities. We enjoy making DLC, but it’s also pretty much a requirement — with Castle Crashers, for example, Microsoft really wanted us to have downloadable content. We figure, if we can’t make it free, we may as well have it go to a good cause.

OXM: If you could do even more community stuff, what would it be?

Dan: More experimenting with different stuff — some of it spur-of-the-moment, even. For example, we recently did a Castle Crashers competition — the Tournament of Champions — to celebrate the game hitting 2 million copies sold over Xbox Live, and that worked out great. Everyone was fighting for a sparkly Xbox, and it was so cool to watch some of the top players battling in Arena mode. It was also a neat way to give back to the community of people who play the game a lot.