South Park Co-Creator on Stick of Truth Sequel Potential
Matt Stone dishes on the challenges of game development, his favorite games, and more.
by Ryan McCaffrey
South Park co-creator Matt Stone is leaving the door open to working on another video game with fellow showrunner Trey Parker. “We’ll see how it’s received,” he told IGN with a laugh as we sat with him shortly before the launch of his well-received RPG The Stick of Truth. “This was a hellacious undertaking – much more than when we signed up for it. Never say never. I would do it again, in some fashion. I think that video games are really interesting.”
Stone discussed how getting a game that he and Parker were integral to the development to was a far cry from the early days of
South Park, when they’d simply license the property out and exert no creative control. “I think we got into it casually. [We said], ‘Oh that’d be cool to do a video game.’ Visually, technical stuff...we can figure that out.
“[But] you sit and watch South park [on TV] a certain way…[and] a game is consumed a certain way. It engages different parts of your brain. The natural rhythms of comedy that we know pretty well from the TV comedy universe, they’re different from a game. And they have to be different, and you can’t resist it. You have to go, ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be different’ instead of being a joke. It’s gonna be a tool that you use that’s gonna be funny when you use it. I would start differently now if we started again.”
We brought up the game’s original release date -- March 2013 -- and asked how that extra year of development time was spent. “There was definitely a big learning curve for Trey and I,” Stone said. “We made a lot of mistakes and assumptions.”
He added, “I’ll cop to the fact that we retooled stuff that we didn’t like and we worked on the game longer than other people would’ve liked us to,” he said, laughing.
Was anything cut from the already shocking game to ensure that it received an ‘M’ rating from the ESRB? “We didn’t have to cut anything for the M rating,” Stone explained. “The stuff that was cut was cut for story and cut for production schedule [reasons].”
Both Stone and Parker are self-professed lifelong gamers, so we had to ask Stone: has he purchased a next-gen console yet? “I’m a huge FIFA fan,” he said. “So I had to get [one] to play FIFA.” He also added, “I’ll be playing Titanfall for sure.”