Ten years on, the creators of Swords & Sworcery discuss its unique fusion of music, art and games

By Chris Schilling

March 24 this year marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. A collaboration between artist Craig D Adams – Superbrothers himself – musician Jim Guthrie and Capybara Games, this moody, offbeat adventure was conceived as “an album you can walk through”. Blending elements of point-and-click and The Legend Of Zelda with a dark fantasy aesthetic and playful writing, Sworcery was a defining moment in mobile and indie games – yet there’s been nothing quite like it since. With Superbrothers giving us an exclusive look at its long-gestating follow-up Jett: The Far Shore, we took the opportunity to speak to the original team – Adams and co-writer/director/ producer Kris Piotrowski, Guthrie and former Capy president and executive producer Nathan Vella – to discuss the history, development and legacy of this remarkable game.

Artist Craig D Adams first started listening to fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie when he bought his 2002 album Morning Noon Night. Guthrie’s second release on independent label Three Gut Records, it featured a number of tracks created using MTV Music Generator on the original PlayStation. Adams, who’d already had his distinctive pixel art published in magazines, sent out a series of mailers to various art directors, and passed some of his work to Guthrie’s label. In return, Guthrie sent Adams a CD of unreleased tracks, including one called Under A Tree, a song that would later become a centrepiece of Sworcery.

Craig D Adams For each song I was like, ‘How would I do justice to this song? How can I make a music video to this song?’ For Under A Tree, I [imagined] a certain colour palette and a flow to it. It sounded to me like walking in the woods, you know, in a kind of pink pre-dawn. Eventually, I settled on one of Jim’s songs to dig in on –a song called Children Of The Clone, which starts with this one [recurring] note, and then through this MTV Music Generator it becomes this whole awesome, nightmarish composition. And so I just kind of put my head down and handanimated a music video using this pixel program. It was pretty desperate in terms of the level of technology –I would press play on my Discman and then press play on my laptop and see how they went. And then, yeah, Jim and I would have met at that time – ’05, I guess? It was all pretty local stuff. I was working downtown Toronto at this Japanese videogame developer [the now-defunct Koei Canada], Jim’s house is two blocks north, Capy two blocks west. And we basically roped Jim into this archaic ancestor of Jett.

Jim Guthrie Yeah, that game was more like Jett than anything else. It’s wild that it’s circled back around.

Craig D Adams After that I was pretty heads-down in the industry for a little while, just shipping some games and living my life. And I was so fired up about making DIY videogames – that was always kind of a North Star for me – but it just wasn’t a thing that I could see happening for a long period of time. But then I played N from Mare [Sheppard] and Raigan [Burns] at Metanet, and it was like, wow, that’s a legitimate videogame, and from local people. And it was pretty inspiring. Everyday Shooter in ’06 – you know, another local game creator. Then there was this indie boom that happened while I was not really paying attention. The iPhone came out somewhere in there. And when I came up for air, I was like, OK, I should put the Superbrothers videos on YouTube now, kick that can down the road a little bit and see if I can connect with somebody who could see what I could bring, and what Jim’s music could bring to a videogame.

Meanwhile, Capybara Games had been enjoying some success making mobile games, particularly with its 2008 puzzler Critter Crunch. Capy was developing the Ubisoft-published Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes when studio co-founders Nathan Vella and Kris Piotrowski attended GDC in 2009.

CDA I’d been hearing about the folks at Capy. The games didn’t seem quite up my street, but they seemed like a very good squad of people, with their heads screwed on. I thought, OK, at some point, I need to cross paths with them. And then I was at GDC ’09. So even though we were working two blocks apart, I bumped into Kris and Nathan in San Francisco [laughs]. And they knew who I was.

Nathan Vella A bunch of us knew Craig’s art, but none of us had ever actually met him. We had just seen some of his pixel art online, and we were doing a lot of pixel art at the time. So we already felt a kind of camaraderie despite not knowing who the human creating it was. We went to a GDC party, and he was handing out postcards that had the same pixel art on it.