Naughty Bear Developers Speak Out on the Stuffing Shredding Mayhem to Come!

Steve Barton |

Jun 23, 2010

With the release of Naughty Bear just around the corner, we had the opportunity to sit down with creative director David Osbourne and lead game designer and scriptwriter Ash Pannel, and if you were excited for this game before, wait until you read about what these guys have in store for us.

“We drew inspiration for Naughty Bear from many different places. When it comes to the mood and overall tone of the game, we were definitely shooting for that Seventies style BBC children’s programming feel,” say the duo. “You know, with that wholesome feel and the narrator telling the kids what they’re going to see today mixed with a juxtaposition of a hatred of cutesy toyline stuff. Obviously we borrowed from a lot of horror influences, but if there’s one movie we liken our game to, we like to use Falling Down, which is about a guy who just one day snaps.”

Judging by all the nightmare videos (see below), some really cool things lie ahead; but the question beckoned … would we get to play through these nightmare parodies?

“The nightmare sequences were set up to give the audience the point of view of how the other bears think of Naughty. You won’t play through those sequences in the game; however, you’ll run across plenty of things and references that you may find familiar and a bevy of new things to discover as well. You’ll see a lot of similarities to said sequences, but you will not play through them exactly as they are. We used those parodies to set up for the consumer exactly what kind of character they’ll be playing as in the game.”

That being said, we wondered exactly what kind of mayhem we can expect out of the game.

Osbourne and Pannel continue, “Other than fighting bare-paw or with weapons, there are over seventy interactive items that can be used to kill the other bears in one way or another. If you want to get a really good score, you’re going to need to find these things and use them. For instance, you may come across a particular type of bear that is cowardly and he’ll run away from you, which is something that’s quite different than other games. When you chase him down, you might find him hiding in a closet or something like that, at which point the player can then decide whether to kill or scare him in the closet; and then once you’ve done that, you can go into the closet yourself, and then you can leap out and scare or kill another bear from there.”

“Intimidation is a really massive part of the game. It’s not just about what you can do in the environment; that’s just a fraction of the game. You can smash stuff, break windows, wreck their vehicles, and things like that; but the majority of the points that you will earn in the game come from the ability of the other bears to witness what you’ve done. It’s always very naughty to kill a bear, obviously, but to get five other bears to witness you kill a bear, that’s five times as naughty. In addition to smashing things, you can also disable them so that when other bears come across them, they become a little confused. It goes even deeper than that, though. When a bear is fleeing to try and leave the level, they may want to grab a car, and when they get to that car and find that you’ve smashed it, that will really freak them out. The will start to trip and fall when they get freaked out and things like that. It isn’t just about killing the other bears; it’s about pushing them and pushing them until they go crazy. Our game has a feature in which you can push the other bears to the point that they will kill themselves.”

Scaring other bears to the point at which they commit suicide? SOLD! Look for Naughty Bear in stores on June 29th.

Naughty Bear – Alien Parody
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Naughty Bear – Blair Witch Parody
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Naughty Bear ... Will Kill You