Double Fine has released a previously unseen pitch video of its heavy metal-inspired action-adventure, real-time strategy game Brütal Legend, to celebrate "Rocktober" — the time of the year when Tim Schafer gets together with fans to matchmake against one another in multiplayer to mark the game getting one year older.
The pitch video was shared on the company's YouTube channel, and featured a discussion between the various people who worked on the pitch, including Schafer, character department lead Dave Russell, character animator Ray Crook, and the concept artist Nathan "Bagley" Staple — all of whom you may recognise from 2 Player Production's in-depth documentaries on the studio's games.
According to Schafer, the pitch video was "brought to all the publishers" after being finished, "who [all] passed on it" before Vivendi ended up picking it up.
As you may recall, though, Vivendi wasn't be the final publisher of the game, with Activision acquiring Vivendi and immediately dropping the project, leading Electronic Arts to step in to distribute the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2009.
One of the most interesting differences featured in the pitch video is that the game has an earlier, slightly more offbeat art direction for the game that Schafer described in the video as "an in-between world" bridging the gap between its 2005 platforming title Psychonauts and what Brütal Legend eventually became.
There are also a bunch of other differences too, though, with the main character of Brütal Legend (the roadie Eddie Riggs), being nowhere to be seen, instead being replaced by an earlier version of the character that resembles Motorhead's Lemmy, and the video showing a bunch of cut characters called "the Motor Freaks". These were essentially large vehicle-riding monsters with protruding eyeballs, that Schafer described as being inspired by the work of American cartoonist and custom car designer Ed Roth.
As Schafer notes, in the video, the game had actually emerged out of his desire to do an RTS game about Ed Roth's "Big Daddy Roth Hot Rods" — an idea he eventually melded with another concept he had for a movie based on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court about a roadie who travels back through time. These characters ended up being cut from the finished game, however, due to the developer simply running behind schedule.
You can watch the full video from Double Fine below. We recommend it, if you happen to love Brütal Legend as much as we do.