Amazon Games has partnered with Glowmade, an independent studio based in the vibrant video game community of Guildford in southern England, to develop and publish the wild, wacky and wonderful game King of Meat. Set in the mystical world of Loregok, this one-through-four player hacking, slashing, online co-op spectacle takes players to a place of dragons, trolls, skeletons, and of course, corporate commercialism! In Loregok, high fantasy meets the glitz, glamor, and media infatuation of modern-day celebrity, and the focus of this obsession is the wildest survival game show imaginable, “KING OF MEAT,” where the player is the entertainment: a Contender seeking glory, gold, and fame. Sounds bonkers? That’s probably because it is.
King of Meat is the fever dream of the team at Glowmade, founded by Jonny Hopper (LittleBigPlanet), Mike Green (Fable), and Adam Sibbick (Fable), who originally met while working together just down the road from Glowmade in Guildford at Lionhead Studios of Fable fame. They have built the studio around the core principle of joyful creativity, which is testament to the rich and vibrant world that Glowmade have created with King of Meat. We sat down with the Glowmade co-founders to find out just how they dreamt up this weird and wonderful world…
So where did the idea for the game and the name King of Meat come from?
“People frequently ask us where the name King of Meat came from, and the truth is, we actually don’t know,” revealed Jonny Hopper, Studio Head. “The earliest mention of it that we can find is a document with the title ‘What If We Don’t Call It King of Meat,’ and all those ideas were rubbish, so we kept it.
As for the game itself, “We could go back in time, I guess, because there's always been this bigger world,” offered Mike Green, Creative Director “When we started, it was set in this old pub on a hill, and inside the pub were these dungeons that linked to monsters and mayhem, with traps and all sorts of carnage. And from there, it’s just taken on a life of its own, especially with Adam's artwork. Adam has a lot of really bizarre dreams that I think sort of feed themselves into our universe.”
“Yes,” added Adam Sibbick, Art Director. “I remember when it was just that, the little pub. And we were like, oh and this is going to be bigger. And there was going to be this entertainment spectacle going on.”
“Assume this pub was almost like Valhalla where all heroes and monsters go,” continued Green. “And they're basically just completely bored. They're so bored that they've got nothing better to do than fight. So it slowly built up from there. Adam's artwork always had these amazing neon signs, vending machines, and TVs, and slowly that all crept in to the point there was this bigger universe. People are actually living here. It's not just a skeleton who's a monster. He's got a real life, thoughts, family, and a job.”
“Over time, it just grew into this whole world. It was quite easy to come up with, which normally tells you when you're on to something fun, exciting, and different. As the game elements evolved and new ideas started coming fast and furiously, we came to recognize the right additions when we found ourselves and the team gleefully repeating, ‘that is SO King of Meat’. It's such an interesting one where you can kind of do anything, but of course there's also really nice rules in place now that everything fits in to the universe we have created.”
You have referenced that King of Meat began by wanting to draw inspiration from Jim Henson’s fantasy Labyrinth and WrestleMania, but was there an inspiration that led you to a wild survival game show concept?
“’The Running Man!,” Hopper announced. “I love that film. I do a wonderful Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. And of course, that film is just bananas, and it was just like, what if we did a sort of medieval Running Man?”
One of the key locations we glimpse in the announcement trailer is Ironlaw Plaza, the social space in the game, which is the ‘backstage’ of the KING OF MEAT show. Can you tell us a bit more about this location?
“So, it was never originally called Ironlaw Plaza,” Sibbick asserted. “In the beginning, it was just that pub we just talked about — the Venture Inn. But then we needed more space, and more function, so it became a whole backstage area. And thematically, it ties it all together too. So now there are characters everywhere. This is the place where the monsters that you've been slaying in the dungeons hang out after the show and they're just, you know, on their time off. They work for King of Meat just as much as you do. And so Ironlaw Plaza is the ‘backstage’ where you get to really hear what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s where a player might hear a monster comically moaning about their kids or the mortgage and stuff like that. It adds a human side to these characters that you were smashing to bits minutes earlier.”
“So of course, all these characters become real,” Hopper added. “They're just playing their part, and that kind of reduces the horror of it, you know? Because you're not actually killing anyone at all, it's just part of the illusion of the show - they're all just players on a stage.”
“Well, not all,” said Green, “You've also NPCs like Professor Beak and Keith Vertex, who are reps for their respective corporations. Professor Beak reps Regulated Effects, the big pharma corporation who sell legal magic — magic is restricted since no one trusts a wizard. And Keith Vertex is this crusty old raver who reps the skeleton union called the Bonepickers.”
“I like Komstruct,” Sibbick added, “Buzzworth Billy is so odd, he’s like this deranged theme park mascot.”
There are five corporations in total, correct? We noticed some fantastical, cheeky adverts plastered around Ironlaw Plaza. So, are these adverts for the different corporations?
“Yes, some of them are. We’ve always said the whole King of Meat world is like medieval meets modern, and that seems like exactly what would happen,” said Green. “If you brought medieval to the modern times, it would have adverts plastered all over it. The show would look monetized to heck, with silly made-up adverts for, like, magic wands or giant eyes that you could summon as security for your home. And with the TV show spectacle, it became another outlet for Adam’s mad brain, so it sort of all clicked into place.”
“It was just that initial high concept of WrestleMania, Hunger Games, Labyrinth, and The Running Man,” Hopper added. “All of those things are so over the top, and if you actually stop to think too much about them, they're insane. But you don't, and so here we are. I didn't think we stopped to think too much about it. We were just like, OK, that's bonkers. And for the fantasy stuff, I think we were also trying to lean into our own development heritage on games like Fable.”
Thank you, and I think I speak for all the future players in saying I can’t wait to play and to respawn from a meat grinder!
And thus concludes our conversation with the folks at Glowmade, who can’t wait to unleash their twisted creation on an unsuspecting public. Whether playing as a pink squid in Cuban heels covered in horns with a duck on your head or a multicolored urban gladiator with honeycomb boots and a sausage hammer, players will soon find themselves saying the same thing the creators did as they added each element of riotous ridiculousness: “That is SO King of Meat.”
