Ten years doesn’t sound like a long time. “Decade” certainly sounds more daunting, but as far as media anniversaries go, 10 years is hardly a good reason for a band to trot out a nostalgic tour for their most influential record. Hell, it’s barely enough time for a piece of art’s long-term influence to become recognizable. But in the fast-moving world of video games, where entire genres are suddenly revolutionized and deconstructed in a flash, 10 years may as well be 50.
Look to a recent anniversary to see that dynamic in action: Enter the Gungeon turned 10 years old earlier this month. That doesn’t sound all too shocking on paper; I clearly recall playing developer Dodge Roll’s bullet hell roguelike on my PlayStation 4 in an apartment I can still draw from memory. But as some of the minds behind the game expressed when we met over a video interview to reflect on one decade of sentient bullets, it was practically a lifetime ago.
“If you think of it as a child, it almost doesn’t need you anymore,” composer Adam Kidd Drucker, who creates music under the name Doseone, told Polygon.
Call him cheeky, but Drucker has a point — at least when it comes to an art form that ages in dog years. Released in 2016, Enter the Gungeon launched into a landscape that sure sounds alien today. Just try to imagine a world where a roguelike that incorporated a dodge roll was still a novel concept! An entire genre has been shaped and reshaped in that time, becoming a Ship of Theseus built from stat-altering relics and passive bonuses. Gungeon’s creators still remember it like it was yesterday, but they’re all too aware that the genre they helped popularize has transformed into something entirely different since then.
Before developer Dodge Roll existed, there was EA Mythic, the Virginia-based studio known for its work on Dark Age of Camelot. Three of the developers who went on to create Enter the Gungeon worked there together in the early 2010s, including Dodge Roll studio co-founder Dave Crooks. In speaking to Polygon, Crooks explained that he and a group of friends inside the studio were growing eager to make a game “outside of the trappings of EA.” Crooks would get that chance, though not on his own terms. EA shuttered Mythic’s Fairfax office in 2014 after the team released Dungeon Keeper Mobile. It was a sudden end for a storied studio, but it gave Crooks and his colleagues space to chase their dream game.
The question was: What was that dream game? Crooks had a title in mind well before an actual game, but his brain started swirling around the roguelike. After all, it was starting to become a hot genre in the indie scene, thanks to success stories like The Binding of Isaac. That was an influence on Crooks, but at the time, it was actually Pokémon Mystery Dungeon that led him to researching the roguelike’s namesake game, Rogue. From there came some dissection of the popular roguelikes of the 2010s.
“I played Rogue Legacy and I really did not like how if you just kept grinding it, it would eventually trivialize the game,” Crooks told Polygon. “So one of the cornerstones [of Gungeon] was, I want to soften it from Rogue, for sure. But I did not want to get to a point where if you’re playing a run after 100 hours in the game, you don’t feel like you earned it. I also wanted to, as much as possible, telegraph all death pretty strongly, make it feel like you saw it coming and you can kind of in your head go, ‘If I had only done X.’”
Thus began the whirlwind development cycle of Enter the Gungeon. The idea came together fast; the team rushed out a prototype in five weeks so they could get it to E3. (They showed up to the expo with no appointments.) The game would take the basic ideas of The Binding of Isaac and combine it with the bullet hell chaos of Ikaruga. The extra twist was that players would have a dodge roll, playing off Dark Souls. Just as much as any actual roguelike, FromSoftware’s games became a major philosophical touchstone for Gungeon.
“One of the unsung superpowers that the Souls games have is that enemy variety in those games is off the charts compared to other games,” Crooks said. “So even though you might play that same level again, you just get to see a bunch of new stuff all the time just in the enemies. And I remember when Nioh came out, which is obviously in the lineage of Souls bursting out into other franchises, it was like every level had two or three enemies types. And then, later, it would be a purple version of it. And I was just like, I am actually shocked that you think you can show up to this genre with that few enemies!”
“Density of discovery” became a big focus in Enter the Gungeon. Dodge Roll wanted to load the game up with distinct enemies, unique weapons, and surprising interactions that made each run feel truly different. The trick was still making a game that felt coherent. Take the original score as an example. Drucker, who met Crooks by chance while DJing a Giant Bomb party, explained that the team wanted music that was cranked up to 11, would drive the pace of a run, and not get too annoying to listen to after tons of attempts. That was just one of the careful balancing acts Gungeon required, finding a happy medium between kitchen-sink design and restraint.
