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My name is Stephen Schieberl. I live in the woods near Portland, Oregon. Hit me up to work together.

Ban the Rewind?

A D M I N

Pictured: Screen grab from Red Fang: Headbang. In keeping with my tradition of using inputs other than pointers and buttons, I was pleased to take part in developing Red Fang 's latest music video... game... which uses headbanging as its sole input. When tasked by Wieden+Kennedy with making a mobile game which requires its players to headbang, the first thought that comes to mind is, "How do you even see your phone?" Not one to say "no" when it's the obvious answer, I tested with it. I realized that it is actual quite natural to lock your phone to your gaze when you rock back and forth. Our internal gyroscope turns our hands into a natural gimbal. I went to work on the mechanical details and we were off to the races. Red Fang: Headbang trailer Andy Gregg , Michael Latzoni, and I had the heaviest hands-on, day-in, day-out haul with Ansel Wallenfang directing. However, there were probably more than a hundred people involved in this project. We landed on a Mortal-Kombat-inspired aesthetic, which ended up drawing from the pantheon of 1990s "photo-realistic" gaming that lead to congressional hearings and eventually the ESRB . We implemented techniques similar to those used in the making of Mortal Kombat : actors in masks and makeup, an extremely limited color palette and screen resolution, no transparency, spritesheets with low frame counts, etc. The list goes on. And the gore is intense. Pictured: The gore is gratuitous and pervasive. The game opens on Red Fang receiving an invitation, written in black metal, to play a gig in the middle of nowhere. Before they arrive, they are kidnapped into a hellish roadhouse where they must perform to survive. Your job is to headbang. Sometimes you headbang just to keep the band alive, sometimes it's to destroy their van, or everything which slides across the bar, or fight your way through a mosh pit. Ultimately, the band's metal sound awakens the dark lord, Brian Posehn , which you must fight in a DDR -style directional headbang battle. Pictured: If you fail to headbang, the band dies in several ways. Andy painted the characters and illustrated the backgrounds, props, and effects. Mike and I took the lion's share of code and animation duties, assisted by Nate Horstmann and Trent Johnson. Beat the game to get the complete list of credits to see all that went into it. Beat it well to get different endings. You may even get to meet Grammy Award winner Matt Pike .