Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may have started its life as a comic book, but it couldn’t exist without video games. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s hit series has always been indebted to retro games like Sonic the Hedgehog and River City Ransom, transforming a Toronto-set coming-of-age story into a dating beat-‘em-up. That has held true through the series multimedia transformation, which has kept video games as a driving visual inspiration across movies and anime. For a series so influenced by games, you’d think that it would have more than one of its own.
That number will soon grow to two with Scott Pilgrim EX. The latest game from Tribute Games, the team behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, is something of an unofficial follow-up to 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. It’s an old-school beat-’em-up built from chunky pixel art, just like the games that inspired the comics. As a studio that’s built its name on paying respects to the 8-bit era of gaming, Tribute Games wasn’t going to miss its shot to go full homage mode.
To dig into the upcoming game’s retro look, Polygon spoke with Bryan Lee O’Malley and Scott Pilgrim EX lead artist Stéphane Boutin over a video call about the influences behind the pixels. Both pointed to a murderer’s row of classics as guiding influences for the upcoming game, as they sought to create a new version of Scott Pilgrim’s world shaped by retro visual aesthetics.
“It’s like if Toronto was built on Mario 2 or Mario 3, and Sonic,” Boutin tells Polygon.
For Bryan Lee O’Malley, video games have always been inseparable from Scott Pilgrim. The original comic is packed with nods to classic games, from Final Fantasy to Bonk’s Adventure. But O’Malley’s heart always belonged to River City Ransom, a classic NES beat-’em-up that’s referenced throughout the series. It wasn’t just a major influence on the original comic, but the first Scott Pilgrim game, too.
“The core thing is River City Ransom, which I did a reference to in book two,” O’Malley tells Polygon. “Scott’s high school, I kind of reframed it as River City Ransom or a beat-’em-up. That kind of became the basis for the first game. And it’s also kind of the model for this game because for me, River City Ransom is an all-time classic. Obviously it’s been replicated many times and now there’s modern River City games. But that one, I can still turn that game on and just have a really good time.”
For O’Malley, it’s the simplicity of that game’s visuals that speak to him. He praises its blocky characters that are only built from a few colors and simple backdrops that slowly evolve the deeper you fight through the city streets. Boutin finds the same appeal in games like River City Ransom, pointing out how expressive they are because of their limitations, rather than in spite of them.
“It almost makes it feel like there’s more variety than it actually has at some point, because everything is kind of the same, so you kind of accept it,” Boutin says. “But then when there’s a little variation, it’s like, oh, it’s a whole new thing! There’s the enemies. They all have the same bodies and four types of heads, but when you see the fourth one, it’s like, ‘whoa, who’s that guy!?’”
That design philosophy is at the heart of Scott Pilgrim EX’s visual style, Boutin says. Tribute Games wanted to create a beat-’em-up that within the constraints of the era it references. That meant creating a foundation for the world built on repeated tiles and other tricks you’d see in games like River City Ransom. That decision would lead to a subtle departure from Shredder’s Revenge, despite the fact that it sounds like a similar pixel-art throwback on paper.
“For Shredder’s Revenge, we really embraced the fact that we didn’t need to have anything tile up or repeat. So each level is really just one big illustration,” Boutin says. “The treatment of it also is a bit more painterly, so it really just depends on where you want to take it. We don’t have color or tile constraints on [Scott Pilgrim EX] either. I tried to bring some of those constraints from the olden days back in just as a stylistic tool, to try to recapture that kind of the stamp feeling. They were repeating stuff everywhere, so it became kind of rhythmic in a way.”
While River City Ransom was a guiding inspiration, it’s far from the only game Tribute was thinking about. In fact, Boutin says that each section of the map is built around a specific reference, taking notes from some of the games that appear in the comic book. O’Malley namechecks the classic arcade brawlers you’d expect, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, as guiding forces, but Boutin had some more surprising games on his mind when creating the art.
“There’s a lot of the layout of the environments that are based off of Chrono Trigger,” he says. “It kind of disappeared a bit during production, but there’s a whole section with the castle that’s really inspired by that. We also looked at a lot of Sonic stuff. A bit less in the environments and the level of the actual games, but in the spirit of it. Sonic has a lot of really funky machines and little gadgets everywhere. So we tried to look at a lot of that, and some graphics also just for UI and interface, with the zigzags and everything. But otherwise, we reference almost everything this time around.”
“Another funny part of that is when you’re doing a big project like this, obviously you can’t just throw everything in,” O’Malley adds, “because the legal department is like, ‘don’t put that in!’ That becomes one of our boundaries as well. Oh, you can’t make it look too much like Sonic because then Sonic will get mad.”
We took a video-game hatchet to Toronto
While plenty of classic games served as an inspiration, Tribute didn’t want to pigeonhole itself either. O’Malley encouraged the team to do their own thing with Scott Pilgrim rather than stick too close to the source material. (When I ask if O’Malley has a design bible he asks artists to stick to, he jokes that “fans have more of a rule book than I do.”) Boutin says that he did have a mood board at some point filled with reference images from the Scott Pilgrim comics, movie, anime, and more, but he wasn’t bound by it.
“I just look at it real hard and I do my own thing,” he says.
Both Boutin and O’Malley stress that Scott Pilgrim EX is respectful to the source material through and through, but that it’s ultimately a transformative work. Boutin says that Tribute was especially inspired by Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the Netflix anime that begins as a one-to-one adaptation of the comics only to take a subversive swerve at the end of its first episode. That approach unlocked something for Tribute, allowing it to get loose and create “new versions of the familiar characters in different contexts,” as O’Malley explains it.
“We took a video-game hatchet to Toronto and turned it into more of a wild environment where anything could happen,” he says.
How fans will react to that approach is yet to be seen, but there are already a few skeptics when it comes to the visual style. Boutin says that the game’s announcement trailer polarized fans, with comments torn over the game’s difference in visual style compared to the 2010 game. I’m a bit surprised when he says it. Scott Pilgrim’s success is built on reinterpretation, whether that’s through rethinking the art design of it for a live-action movie or completely deconstructing the comic’s story in the anime. Surely a different pixel-art philosophy isn’t enough to cause a panic, right? When I ask where that reaction is coming from, O’Malley inadvertently lays out the secret to Scott Pilgrim’s success.
“People are always scared of whatever’s new, but that’s why it has to be new,” he says. “I think you have to do something that feels like now, and you have to be able to go out on a limb and risk people not liking it because if you just do the same thing over and over, it just doesn’t give me the juice that I want.”
