South Park - Interview @ Spike

Spike.Tv had the chance to interview Matt Stone to discuss the Making of South Park: The Stick of Truth. Here is asmall part of the interview.

Spike: After writing the show, and the movie, what was the thinking going into the game, as to how to make it a funny, interactive experience?

Stone: It was hard. The one thing I will say is that me and Trey have a really good sense of is how to make a 22-minute show that's funny. We know this scene has to be funny. We know scenes are about a minute and a half to two minutes long. There should be a montage. It should feel like this. We just have this intuitive sense of 22-minutes, and that just comes from years, and decades of doing that length. We've done movies, and when we do movies, or things like the Book of Mormon, or this game we always have to find our way there. We make a lot of mistakes, and go, "this is what it is. Oh, okay. That isn’t what it is, but we keep a little bit." So we do go like this (makes a hand motion in the approximate shape of a "z") to find that answer.

What we kind of found in this is that what we didn’t like in the first incarnation of the thing that we wrote. It was too much like cut scene hunter: you go here and you see something funny, and you go do some stuff, and then you maybe laugh when you see another cutscene. That was the main challenge of the game - how to make doing stuff funny. How to make it consistently. How to work the cutscenes in the game together in a fluid way where they kind of went into each other, so that there was actions in between them that made sense.

With South Park and the animation, we knew intuitively that it should be possible, because this was the look. It looks like the TV show. How do you go in and out of where you're in control, and not, and make it fun, that was the main challenge, totally.