BITMOB: So did you come up with the idea for Runner even before Canabalt came out?

AN: [Laughs.] Yeah, we did, actually. Our plan was in place for Runner when we started Bit.Trip Beat -- we knew what game number four was going to be. It is funny, though, that you mention Canabalt, because our last level in Bit.Trip Runner was going to be jumping across rooftops of gray buildings as the city was in kind of this disarray. And then we played Canabalt, and we were just like, "Oh man, Adam Atomic did this!"

We're friends with him, so we emailed him and were like, "Ah, dude, we're making this game -- and it was going to be like your game!" So we kind of backpedaled a little bit; we took it down off of the rooftops and into the city. Although I don't think that Adam Atomic would've minded...it just felt more like the right thing to do. But then we did add a little section of running on the rooftops -- you've got to be true to your vision.

BITMOB: That's funny. It's interesting how that fairly simple mechanic is kind of going crazy right now -- Canabalt, Robot Unicorn Attack....

AN: And Tomena Sanner just came out for WiiWare, that's an autorunning platformer as well.

BITMOB: Tomenawhat?

AN: Tomena Sanner? It's on WiiWare and it's 500 points, and it's super bizarre. Like, I don't even know if I can call it a good game, but it's definitely worth 500 points. You have to have it. It's very weird.

I think it's cool that there's this whole new genre coming out, you know, Canabalt, Bit.Trip Runner, Tomena Sanner, the unicorn thing you mentioned, all these games where you're autorunning and you're just sort of spazzing out, hitting these buttons with this timing -- and it's ultra precise timing that you need. I like to think that great minds think alike, and we're all together and rockin' it.

BITMOB: It's interesting to see a new genre suddenly emerge that's based on such a simple and elegant gameplay mechanic. It's kind of like when tower defense suddenly blew up -- it's the classic "why didn't I think of that five years ago?"

AN: It is neat. That's one of the things that appeals to me, at least, but I think it also appeals to a lot of gamers -- the simplicity of this genre. You know what you have to do; you just have to do it with that precision. And if you can nail that then you know you're going to do well. And if you fail, you know exactly what you did wrong. There's a certain elegance in the discrete nature of that success or failure, and I think that's cool.

BITMOB: The interaction of gameplay and music is a big theme throughout the Bit.Trip series. How does that change in Runner, or does it? It seems like you aren't directly influencing the music quite as much as you were in the previous games.

AN: You're absolutely right, you're not as involved in creating or playing with the music in Bit.TripRunner. It's still a musical game, and you do interact with the music in meaningful ways, but it's a lot less sort of deliberate musical interaction. There's a very specific reason why we've gone that direction with Bit.Trip Runner, and that's because, as Commander Video continues on his journey, he is less and less in touch with what he was in touch with in Bit.Trip Beat. So that ethereal sort of soul, if you want to call it a soul, whatever Commander Video was before he became a human is now more and more fleeting.

I think people will find, in game five, a really interesting spin on that [as] we take that idea a little bit further still. So yes, you're definitely noticing a little less musical interaction, but no less musical a game.

BITMOB: What did you look to when you were working on the kick and slide moves?

AN: In terms of his moves, the most direct influence was Super Mario Bros. for his jump. We've got the jump in there where if you tap it he just does a little hop, and if you press and hold he does a longer jump. It didn't feel right for a long time in development, and then we really started looking into his jump to make sure it felt better and better.

When New Super Mario Bros. Wii came out, we brought that into the office, and we really started examining how the different jumps in that game felt and how they worked, and tried to get it as close to the Super Mario Bros. jump as we could. So that was one move that Commander Video does that had a lot of direct influence from some other games.

The slide, I would say -- even though we didn't have a lot of sort of deconstructing of design methods used in other games, I often thought of the slide that was introduced in Mega Man 3. There's something about the slide in Mega Man 3 that feels so right to me; it always has. So that was one of the things that I kept trying to think about while we were working on the slide.

His kick kind of actually came about because those brick walls in Pitfall! just pissed me off so much. You want to go through them, because you know that that's the fastest way -- and you can't. So we got a kick in there so that he could kick down walls in his way, because Commander Video will not be stopped.

BITMOB: I was kind of surprised when I first saw him kick in an early gameplay video -- it's the first aggressive move Commander Video makes.

AN: That's true. You know, we thought about that; he actually had a couple other aggressive moves in there, too, that we ended up cutting. I'm not going to tell you about 'em right now, because we may add them into game number five, and I want them to be special and a surprise there.

But yeah, game number four, you're starting to see Commander Video dealing with the harsh reality of what it means to be in this world. And as you progress through the levels you'll kind of see what that means, as you see the serenity of the moon, the destruction of the wilderness, and the degradation of the city. It's more of a sad kind of a thing. So Commander Video's pulling out all the stops.

Cut-scene storyboards: