On Friday, Twitter users were treated to The Bear The Game, a comedy sketch in the form of a first person cooking/life simulation game. It’s also a shooter. It’s also kind of like Grand Theft Auto. It’s also like Shenmue. At least I see Shenmue. I think most things can be traced back to Shenmue.
Anyway.
the bear video game actually looks pretty cool pic.twitter.com/pijrftMFDr
— Michael Kandel (@K_A_N_D_E_L) June 28, 2024
Something I love very deeply about the modern internet are interpretations and expressions of game design tropes from people who aren’t dyed in the wool game developers or games media figures. Fashion TikTokers doing “Choose Your Fighter” style videos. Elaborate physics-bending death animations from Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Point-and-click adventure horror (a real game came out of her stuff, although she eventually dropped out and only the demo remains).
The Bear The Game is just the latest, and perhaps most elaborate, version of this trend. Michael Kandel and Joe Miciak make sketch comedy together as Hotel Art Thief, but the 3D animation seen in The Bear The Game hasn’t always been part of the process.
“We both were unemployed/underemployed and started writing sketches together to pass the time,” Miciak told VGBees via Twitter DM about Hotel Art Thief’s genesis. It wasn’t until 2022 when Miciak began experimenting with Blender, a free 3D modeling tool, for a sketch called “Drench.”
user:Brian(box) pic.twitter.com/M6qP9BLbZu
— Michael Kandel (@K_A_N_D_E_L) August 4, 2023
“It was really half-baked,” said Miciak of this first attempt at creating 3D animated faces. It wasn’t until “user:Brian(box)” in 2023 that Miciak got comfortable crafting 3D heads and placing facial textures. “It’s a chatroom sketch Mike (Kandel) wrote during (the Covid) shutdown,” Miciak recalled, which originally was envisioned in 2D with ASCII art — “I eventually learned how to make the heads, and decided to make it more of an N64 aesthetic.”
You might recognize some of the environmental art from the sketch, as well, which was lifted directly from Nintendo 64 classic Perfect Dark. Even though Miciak has gotten comfortable and confident enough to make sketches using Blender, he’s not a big fan of the software itself.
“Mike will sometimes come up with an idea for a sketch involving 3D objects, and can see me debating with myself whether I want to subject myself to it,” he admitted, “But I break pretty easily.” For The Bear The Game and other sketches with 3D heads featuring facial textures, Miciak uses FaceBuilder, a popular add-on for Blender.
“Mike helped out by taking a bunch of screenshots from The Bear,” he explained, “and I did some photoshopping to make sure all the angles were roughly the same color temperature and in the same outfit.” That process of plastering the different-angled photos to the models is fairly automatic, though it’s not perfect by any stretch. “I did some texture painting in Blender to fix any glaring issues,” he noted, “but as you can see in the video, I kind of like when the faces look a little fucked up/asymmetrical.”
Once the faces are (mostly) in place, the animation process can begin. Animation is all about keyframes, anchors in time where all the parts of an image have to be to create movement. Fortunately, tools exist that facilitate this often painstaking task. One of those powerful tools is Live Link Face, a mobile app created by Epic that records video then sends keyframe data back to a program like Blender.
“So Mike recorded all the actors’ audio, and I got my Andy Serkis on and read all their lines to my iPhone,” said Miciak. In case you’re envisioning elaborate and expensive motion capture equipment on a sprawling Hollywood soundstage, Miciak quickly dispelled the notion. “I was running out of time at the end, so I was on the subway taking these weird videos of myself.” The whole thing came together in about three weeks and was timed perfectly for the Season 3 premiere of the show.
Clearly the duo understand The Bear and cooking tropes enough to create an incisive and thorough parody of one of television’s most lauded shows, all the way down to the much-discussed needle drops like the cover of Radiohead’s “Let Down” that hits toward the end of the sketch.
Even in the music choices are a signpost to the games and moments that inspired the aesthetic and mechanical qualities of The Bear The Game. Both major tracks in the “demo” are covers of 90s songs with Nintendo 64 soundboards by artist on4world — the aforementioned Radiohead song as well as the super ambient “Rhubarb” by Aphex Twin.
Miciak mentioned licensed games from the PlayStation 2 era as strong influences on this style, listing Spider-Man 2, Enter the Matrix, and the Batman Begins movie tie-in as major contributors. This era represents “games that really try to lazily shoe-horn plot from the movie into the game, to the point where it gets distracting” to Miciak. Arguably the most interesting of these inspirations is Enter the Matrix, a game happening parallel to the events of The Matrix Reloaded, which struck a chord with Miciak.
He recalled that “you only get to play a vague, random character [editor’s note: I know Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe isn’t random but I get this 100%] and you’re sort of like ‘But… I just want to play as the main character?'” Playing around the events of the popular film released simultaneously was an ingenious and, often in hindsight, deeply interesting move, but it was also a big swing! And this was part of what inspired the character select screen of The Bear The Game, which has you inhabiting original characters that will interact with the ones you’re far more familiar with from the show’s story. This creates a tension from the outset by putting yourself in a place you don’t really feel like you belong.
I think these specific examples serving as a reflection of what could have been if television and film tie-ins continued with this trajectory is fascinating. I also love learning about what people latched onto that aren’t in our specific bubble; often too close to every new release and cultural moment that we lose sight of what millions of people who come in contact with games actually remember and hold onto.
“I have a long history of watching my friends play video games because I was so bad at them,” Miciak concluded. “Maybe that’s why I like making fake ones so much.”
