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StudioMDHR founders quit jobs, remortgaged houses to work on Cuphead

Animated platformer was originally worked on by three people working at weekends

The creators of hotly anticipated indie platform game Cuphead resorted to some dramatic measures in order to commit to its development.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Chad Moldenhauer reveals he and his brother Jared - both co-founders of StudioMDHR - initially began the project as a hobby, but dedicated all their time to it after its debut stunned indie fans.

"The truth is that we started Cuphead as a three-person team, just working on the weekend," he told the site. "With such a small team, we knew to keep our scope small - there were just a few bosses and a couple of weapons and everything was just less insane. We demoed Cuphead at E3 2015 and the response was mind-blowing."

He continues: "We realised that there were a lot of people out there that wanted what we were doing. My brother and I quit our jobs, remortgaged our houses and began expanding the team.  This was our chance to actually deliver the game we wanted to make all along, rather than the cut-scope game we originally planned with a three person team."

He goes on to explain that ramping up the scale of the game to the original vision is part of the reason for Cuphead's long development time.

ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla told us earlier this year the platform holder was keen not to rush StudioMDHR with the development of Cuphead.

After years of E3 appearances without any word of a release date, Cuphead was finally given a confirmed launch of September 29th during this year's Xbox press conference.

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James Batchelor avatar
James Batchelor: James is Editor-in-Chief at GamesIndustry.biz, and has been a B2B journalist since 2006. He is author of The Best Non-Violent Video Games
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