It seems inevitable at this point that no matter how things turn out, whether that be good, bad or just different, the future is going to be weirder than the present.  Will it be weird enough that a mega-corporation fuses spiders and dinosaurs together in an attempt to bioengineer a controlled food source?  Once upon a time the answer might have been no, but it's been an interesting couple of years and there's no indication that sanity will establish a foothold on the events of future-world history.  So, spidersaurs did what spidersaurs were bound to do and broke free, and the only reasonable method of stopping them is pure classic run & gun action.  Adding to the new-retro style is that the entire game is wrapped up in '90s cartoon vibes, including an animated intro theme song heavy on the screaming guitars.  The future is weird, sure, but maybe it can be a little awesome too.

WayForward's Tomm Hulett and Matt Bozon were kind enough to answer a few questions about Spidersaurs, the updates its receiving from the Apple Arcade version, and making a new game in an old genre.  They insisted on giving interesting responses for every question, so without further ado:

[Hardcore Gamer] Let's start with the obvious question: dinosaurs are awesome, spiders are icky.  "Icky" being a euphemism for eight-legged nightmare fodder that people will insist are harmless despite the lurking evil deep in an arachnid brain that can only draw sustenance from the terror of its victims. The gaming origin of the spidersaurs is as a food source, but what pushed you to fuse these two very different creatures together in the first place?

[Tomm Hulett] Good question! For this one I'm going to throw to our creative director, Matt Bozon, who developed the brand itself before bringing me onboard to direct the game!

[Matt Bozon] I wanted to make a new WayForward IP that combined retro two-player action with a 1980s toy-tie-in cartoon feel. Like a lot of those shows, I looked for a modern-day problem and solution that science was proposing today: that as the planet heats up and food sources dwindle, humanity might need to consider bugs as a protein-rich food source. But to make it “’80s style,” I added a greedy corporation that would look for the cheapest and least-responsible way to get more processed bug meat, and that’s with dinosaur-sized bugs. The bugs with the most drumsticks would have to be spiders. Yes, I know that spiders aren’t insects, but this was an attempt to embrace bad corporate thinking. So this happens, and then our down-and-out interns sign up to be food testers, they gain weird abilities, and now are the only ones who can stop the giant food when it runs amok: Victoria with the power of rock, and Adrian with his sports gun.

[HG] Contra 4 was almost 15 years ago and the gaming landscape has changed immensely since then. Does it feel easier to get acceptance for this type of game today than it did back in 2007 or did it feel at the time like the market was just being underserved?

[TH] The attitude toward retro-style games was much different back then. Even ports and remakes were extremely rare — the Wii Virtual Console was only just starting — but brand-new games? Forget about it. New Super Mario Bros. came out the year we pitched Contra 4 (its success was the focus of our presentation, in fact!) and we kind of rode that early wave. Soon afterward we got new versions of Bionic Commando, Mega Man 9, and so on. But it wasn't until the boom of indie games the last decade that retro action games became something perfectly normal to enjoy on modern hardware.

Around Contra 4's release you still saw a lot of hemming and hawing over a $15 price tag on XBLA, but thankfully more players now see the value of these experiences.

[HG] Does making a run & gun shooter feel like creating a retro throwback, or do you think gaming has expanded enough that a Saturday morning cartoon-styled shooter with spider-dinosaurs just fits right into the current gaming landscape, no "retro" tag needed?

[TH] After everything we said above, I do think run-'n'-guns are underrepresented compared to some classic genres (cough, Metroidvania). That might contribute to them feeling a little more retro. Why is that?

I could probably speculate that run-'n'-guns evolving directly into FPS via Doom partially eclipsed the mainstream appeal of their 2D legacy, but maybe the answer is simpler — maybe those classic shooters are so great it's an intimidating genre to crack. Contra? Metal Slug? Turrican? Gunstar? It's a murderer's row of gameplay perfection. Now we have Cuphead and Blazing Chrome in the mix. There's so much room for nuance from game to game too, let's cross our fingers for a run-'n'-gun renaissance.

[HG] The console/PC release of Spidersaurs contains new features like an extra level and new gameplay modes, which are also coming to the Apple Arcade version.  What was it like revisiting the game and why did it need a whole extra stage on top of everything else?

[TH] On any game, once it's finished there were a bunch of ideas that weren't feasible at the time, as well as polish tasks that couldn't happen before release. On top of that, returning to any project after gaining experience and perspective for a few years lets you see it with fresh eyes. So it was a rare treat to come back to Spidersaurs with this opportunity.

The team, including creative director Matt Bozon, got together, examined the game as a whole, and identified key areas we could add, tweak, or improve. So users are getting an even better game overall. That includes new difficulty settings so all players can enjoy the game, as well as Arcade and Speed Run modes to encourage multiple replays. We also saw some users on Apple Arcade who weren't happy with the touch control method, so we created two new approaches as additional options (and, of course, playing with a gamepad is still possible).

The original storyline was a bit open-ended, like any good ’80s animated pilot. We thought players could use a little more closure, so we expanded Spidersaurs with an epilogue and the "true final boss" behind all the mayhem. Of course, as you might imagine, the final boss of a game called Spidersaurs is, uh…large. Too large to fit into the existing stages, so we needed to build a new one. Maybe we threw in some exclusive enemies too. Who can say? It's pretty dark down there…

[HG] Baseballs make sense as projectiles, but how on Earth does a guitar shoot anything?  Is there no leap of logic so great that covering it up with Saturday Morning Cartoon Cool can't bridge the gap?

TH: Is it that strange? Guitars shred, musicians attack solos, bands slay, sets rip. I mean, if your guitar is extra killer you might call it an “axe.” Sounds pretty dangerous to me.

[HG] WayForward has always been dedicated to 2D art.  Were there any visual design or animation challenges specific to Spidersaurs that were difficult (or at least tricky) to overcome?

[TH] Over the years we've picked up many different techniques, and we used just about all of them in Spidersaurs! Mixing high-quality "cartoon-style" visuals with classic run-'n'-gun playfeel is a tricky tightrope to walk, it turns out. If you think about the hits from Konami and Treasure, they used state-of-the-art programming tricks but some pretty abstract visuals. Think about all those crazy animated bosses with silver orbs for limbs.

We have a ton of imaginative thunder-critters, each requiring detailed, well-rendered limbs (in many cases eight of them!) — but those crisp visuals still need to feel like the silver orbs of yore. Plus, you might be surprised to hear, Spidersaurs come in a lot of unusual shapes, so even figuring out HOW something should move was sometimes a challenge.

In the end we have some characters who are entirely hand animated (including our brand-new boss), and others that use a program called Spine to create that old-school segmented feel, and any other tricks we could think of.

[MB] One of the fun art-related challenges with this one was to create a 1980s’ TV-style opening to make it feel like a show that never was. For that, we worked with animation producer Erin Bozon (Shantae, Futurama) and Powerhouse Animation Studios (Netflix’s Castlevania series) to create an OP reminiscent of those shows of yesteryear, complete with a Saturday-morning-style rock song by Richard Bichler and Cristina Vee.

[HG] The nostalgia of today is for 90s and early 2000s cartoons, which Spidersaurs leans into heavily.  20 years from now the kids growing up on the current cartoon diet of shows ranging from Steven Universe to Hilda to Owl House to Primal, not to mention an insane amount of anime, will be making their own games. Can you imagine what that's going to look like?

[TH] I'm actually fascinated by how obscure bits of culture become immortal as they're passed from show to show (to game, to film, to comic, to show) in all these little memes. "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" is a song older than my father, but I can sing it for you because it was on Tom and Jerry. It's great seeing kids excited about Craig of the Creek, and seeing ideas they borrowed from Ghibli (or Sonic the Hedgehog) which may have come from Astroboy, inspired by classic Disney and Warner Bros., which referenced 1920s’ jazz somehow, and so on.

I can only imagine what will live on in the minds of our grandchildren, as they pour a frosty bowl of Spider-O's and plop down in front of their VR tele-stims. I just hope the opening themes still hold a candle to King Arthur and the Knights of Justice.

Huge thanks to Tomm Hulett and Matt Bozon for answering all our questions with grace and thoughtfulness, and to WayForward's top-tier PR person (full disclosure: and friend/former co-worker from decades back) Chris Hoffman for setting the whole thing up.  Spidersaurs doesn't have a concrete release date yet but should be out relatively soon, coming to PC, Switch, PS4 and PS5, plus Xbox One and X/S.