Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live,King of Meatis a 1–4-player hack-and-slash game that thrusts players into a series of bizarre dungeons. Made by Glowmadein partnership with Amazon,King of Meattakes place in the fantasy/sci-fi world of Loregok, where people seek their fortune by participating in the titular gauntlet that’s televised worldwide.
Based on its reveal trailer alone,King of Meatlooks like an incredibly vibrant and funny co-op game, and it’s clear the developers have a lot of passion for their project. That passion was on full display when Game Rant sat down to talk with two members ofKing of Meat’s development team: studio head Jonny Hopper and creative director Mike Green.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Origins of King of Meat
Q. Where did the name “King of Meat” come from?
Hopper:I love this question. Nobody knows! Nobody can remember. The game was called King of Meat, then there was a document called “What if we don’t call it King of Meat?” All the ideas in there were rubbish, so that’s the truth! We don’t know, but it works. It’s the right name for the game, I think.
Green:I think we always thought it was going to change, it’s just so ridiculous, but then it could never be anything but that.
Hopper:We’ve had a couple of partners who have been like, “Love the codename, what’s the real name?” and we’re like… that’s the name.
Q. Do you seeKing of Meatas the type of game that would have a lot of collaborations?
Hopper:It’s definitely something that’s really interesting. The game has a particular style to it. Everything is really cohesive, but you can easily imagine how it could pull in other things. It’s not something we’d talk about today. The key thing for us is that everything remains in-world, it fits within the IP and the branding of what the game is, but there are some ideas we’ve been having about some stuff we’d love to do. We shall see!
I don’t know if you know much about WWE, but “Meat” is a common chant. There’s one guy named Big Bronson Reed who is all meat. Since I’ve heardKing of Meat’s name, I haven’t been able to disconnect the two. He needs to be in the game.
Hopper:It’s funny you should say that. The inception of the game was us sitting around, asking what stuff we love. One of the things wasDavid Bowie and Jim Henson’sLabyrinth, the other thing was WWE. This was like six years ago. We thought, what if we made those two things into something? It’s great you made that connection!
What Informed King of Meat’s Distinct Sense of Humor
Q. How would you describeKing of Meat’s approach to humor?
Hopper:Mike is the creative director. When we’re playing the game and a new idea comes up, a lot of Mike’s assessment is “That’s really dumb, let’s put it in!” It’s quite British, I suppose, in terms of the way we approach stuff. By that, I mean we look atgames likeFableand that sort of line of humor. We don’t take ourselves seriously. We’re not setting out to make a satire, we’re just having fun with this world we enjoy messing about with.
Green:A lot of it comes from the team as well. I loveBritish humor, especially when it gets a bit dark and weird. We get a lot of ideas, and we’re always trying to steer it in a certain direction, but the team gets the game. It was easy to pitch, people get it. It’s like, “I think we should do this,” and they’re like, “I think you’re right, I think we should.”
Hopper:Like, you’ve got a jump. Then someone said weneed to have a double jump. Then it was, “What if we had a triple jump?” and then it’s, “What if the triple jump was a belly flop?” That’s a stupid idea, but it’s quite fun. Then Sam, who’s our game programmer, is like, “What if the belly flop does some damage?” Then I ask, “Well, when you get poisoned in the game, surely you have to belly flop to get rid of the poison?” All those fun ideas come out of those systems.
Green:It took a long time to get the right jump. We had a Luigi jump and a Yoshi jump. We went through them all.
Hopper:Going back to the humor, I think the commentator is a really key part of that. This guy called Al Doyle isthe voice artist. Quite a lot of that is him ad-libbing it. Originally, he went to the pub with Lewis, who’s doing the audio, and they just chatted, and he came up with this stuff. That’s actually really helped some of the tone of the matches.
Green:There was a recording a couple of weeks ago. It was him just gargling. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous, it was absolutely brilliant.
How King of Meat’s User-Generated Content Works
Q. User-generated content is a huge part ofKing of Meat. How granular can this system get?
Hopper:The idea of the system is that it’s very hard to make something bad. That’s the baseline: you start off by placing rooms, and that’s essentially a play space. It’s a room, it’s got a configuration, but you can change all the floors, add a load of bad guys, add a load of traps. Then you can redecorate all of that and you can go mess with the logic. If you want to, you can go—room, room, room, room, go—and that’s a level. It’s a legitimate level. It’s not a very good level, but it does qualify!
Then you can go back round and think about changing the floors, you can set everything on fire, and add some hammers and some spikes. Then you can dive straight in. You can start your level there and it’s instant to test it, so you can iterate and test without ever feeling like it’s work, and go into Logic Mode, which is how everything’s connected.
Here you can set up the conditions and how stuff reacts, but you don’t have to. We want to have that stuff for the experts, though we also want to make it so that every time you place the object, it should just do the thing it’s expected to do without any fuss.
There’s a giantspinning spike trap, you’re able to just throw it down and it’s cool. There’s a hammer, you just put it in there and it swings and knocks you about; but then, if you want to, you can set it up to be triggered by a thing or spawn bad guys. It is granular, but we don’t force you to be really deep with it.
Green:The hope is that someone who isn’t as confident could build something fairly quickly but someone who’s an expert who really likes to tinker will get the most out of it and do things that we can’t or haven’t thought about. It’s going to be exciting.
Q. IsKing of Meatgameplay-first, or is there more lore than meets the eye?
Hopper:I don’t know how many characters you met, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much we can do with this world. The moment-to-moment gameplay is critically important because we can do all the world-building we want, but if I’m not having fun in the dungeons, then what’s the point?
When you step back, we’ve got these mad characters, we’ve got these corporations. One of the things we get to do asa live gameis plan these narrative beats over time to explore some of that, lLike changing the plaza, doing new campaigns, or new events. There’s a lot of scope. There’s a lot we plan to do for sure.
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King of Meatis currently in development for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
