The Case
The Solution
Best Fiends games have been downloaded over 100 million times. But what makes this IP special is the wide variety of storytelling content they are producing across platforms. So when they had this idea to create a nostalgic, 90s-arcade-inspired, short YT series featuring the Best Fiends characters in the multiverse of our favorite childhood games, we just couldn't turn away our gaze in awe.
To create an epic, hilarious, 16bit, animated , serialised adventrue tribute to one of the gratest video games from the early days of the industry. And bring that sweet nostalgic vibe, tons of cameos & refs and unlimited joy to the hearts of the growing Best Fiends fans who used to be kids in a time where 128KB of something was... well, something.
The Process
Animatic
Final
Our first and most important taks was to figure out a good way to port the Best Fiends characters from the game into a 16bit inspired universe. Something they had never been designed for. We had to devise a style that will allow us to go as close as possible to the original games but stay true to the Best Fiends DNA.
We utilised various approaches to achieve visual and audio effects that were iconic for the arcade era like pixel dithering, limithed color palettes, low-res graphics, low-sampling sounds, etc. We wanted to simulate the contraints developers had back in the 90s in processing power and storage. That's what get them so creative in the first place.
This approach gave us the upper hand from a tehcnical POV as well. Working in small resoultions with intentionally limited files on modern computers enable us to optimise the production pipeline for speed and efficiency.
Probably the biggest challenge in the series was to find the balance between giving a tribute to our favorite games from the 90's but stay on the safe side of the copyright laws. We had to do an extensive research about each game and survive through a thorough check with Seiously legal team on each line of script we wrote. That pushed us into a super creative mode and brought some really funky ideas to live.
Best Fiends project was an eye openner for us from a marketing perspective. The idea to take your game characters, lore and drama and expand it into another storytelling formats is exciting by itself. But the fact that we managed to attach the game IP to iconic content such as Final Fantasy, Sonic, Monkey Island, Street Fighter and Super Mario Cart multiplies the IP's storytelling and outreach potential exponentially.
The Results
Best Fiends project was an eye openner for us from a marketing perspective. The idea to take your game characters, lore and drama and expand it into another storytelling formats is exciting by itself. But the fact that we managed to attach the game IP to iconic content such as Final Fantasy, Sonic, Monkey Island, Street Fighter and Super Mario Cart multiplies the IP's storytelling and outreach potential exponentially.
8
6
400k
4.2B
episodes
34 min total length
months of
production
90s-nostalgia
gamers reached
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