Halfbrick: Thanks for your time Joe! Tell us a bit about your early career.
Joe Brumm The bulk of my early career was in London. Back when I first started I was doing E-cards - this is like early 2000s – as well as doing a lot of hand-drawn stuff. Then I made a short film called Pong in Flash, set in a game of Pong where everything goes a bit crazy - then I made another short called Samples. Those two went “viral”, back before the term viral was even a thing.
I really loved Flash and cut-out animation. I mostly worked in cut-out animation - puppet animation - for that whole 10 years I lived in London, working on Charlie and Lola and various other shows.
Then I moved back to Brisbane and started my own company - Studio Joho. We did all sorts of jobs as work for hire for places like GOMA [Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane], and projects for the ABC, including a little series called Tiny Power. We also took in small jobs - College Humour were our main client, and we did a lot of their shorts during that period.
By then I’d also made the pilot for Dan the Man.
Was there a particular game or experience playing games that inspired Dan the Man?
Joe I loved all those old pixel games. I liked how simple they were. You're always trying to save the Princess, but really as a player, you're mostly interested in just kicking the **** out of the bad guys and making it to the next level.
So I thought it would be funny for a player who wants to experience that bit of escapism to be confronted with the opposite - a little bit of real life. So you’ve rescued the Princess, and now you’ve got to marry her. And she's a Princess, right? So she's used to a certain level of comfort, and now it’s your job to provide for that.
It became a funny little simple idea to follow the confusion and annoyance of this guy who is this player - who just wants to get to the next stage and keep kicking the **** out of all the ninjas but keeps getting stuck in these other tasks.
Episodes I’d seen of The Simpsons and South Park gave me the confidence to tell a story “over the shoulder” of a player in a game, and that’s what appealed to me. It wasn't as if this player has been sucked into the video game, which had been done more often.
I was very much interested in the idea of a real person playing the game, and you're learning about the player - and even learning a little bit about the game maker - purely by watching the gameplay. I like that it makes the audience do a lot of work. The audience has to piece it together in their head that this unseen player is getting frustrated and just wants to be able to play the game as he wants to play.
I’d been going down the traditional route to take it into production, trying to find a producer and say “hey, look at this little pilot - can we get a series?”. I spent a good year or two of doing that, but it often meant I was being asked to turn it into things that I didn't want.
Eventually no-one was interested, so I edited [the pilot] down, stuck it on YouTube – and this was back when YouTube was relatively new - and I forgot about it. Sometime later, I was teaching at a university, and one of my students was doing some pixel art and I said, “oh, yeah, I've done a bit of this. Look, I'll show you.” I got online, saying, “I did this thing called Dan the Man” and he'd already seen it. He goes, yeah, this thing's gone crazy. And I suddenly looked, and it was like 2 million views or something.
So it had found a rich vein of people who love those games, which was very cool.
Can you tell us how Dan the Man – the game – followed on from that?
Joe I remember I was in the park with my brother Dan [Dan Brumm, Joe’s actual brother, not to be confused with the fictional character Dan]. He had an iPhone and I'd never seen an iPhone before, and he goes “Check this out!”
The first thing he did was to load Fruit Ninja up - and literally I had not seen a touch screen before. He says ‘swipe that fruit’, a bit of fruit came up and I swiped it and I was just laughing. It was one of those moments where you realise a little bit of the future has arrived.
A few weeks later I was thinking, “wow, whoever made this Fruit Ninja game obviously knows what they're doing. I might get in touch with them and see if they want to make this game.” I got online and I was thinking that the studio is probably based in San Francisco or LA or something, but Halfbrick was in Brisbane, same as me.
So, I rang up and I got Shainiel [Halfbrick’s CEO Shainiel Deo]. He used to answer the phones back then. Fruit Ninja was the first or second most popular iPhone game in the world at this point. This must have been 2011 or 2012.
I spoke to Shainiel, then sent him Dan the Man and he said, “yeah, I love it, what do you want to do with it?” I said, “Well, I want to make a series of shorts and then make a game.” And he said, “Yep, I'll do it with you.”
I remember just loving the very first few prototypes of the game I played because it was this great mix of Wonder Boy and Streets of Rage. Although I hadn't played a lot of games in the few years prior, I hadn't fully experienced that in other platformers.
I wanted a proper 80s platformer, but with the combat of Streets of Rage. I wanted to be able to punch and kick and flip and grab and throw. When it eventually came out and I played it, I loved it. I still love it. It's just so satisfying. Running up to these guards and just kicking the **** out them.
What was it was like to see the success of the game when it finally released?
Joe Yeah, it was cool. It was. I mean, it was just amazing. I was so grateful that it ended up happening.
The development nearly got cancelled. It was getting hard to make the game, so Shainiel said “Take what we've made of it and see if you can make a go of it”. So I animated a two or three minute Kickstarter video which I've still got somewhere.
I went back to Halfbrick and said to Shainiel “I'm going to launch this Kickstarter tomorrow” but as I was about to push play on that Kickstarter, Shainiel said “No, no - bring it back to us. We've got a team now, we'll finish it”.
I'd been on a journey with Dan the Man, so for the game to even see the light of day was quite a big thing for me. To see it hit number one in different countries and territories was really cool. My mates were playing it and then later my mates’ kids were playing it.
What that success did was bring me an extra level of financial stability, and that was around the time that I started working on the idea for Bluey. So Dan the Man was income that allowed me to take some months off and just write the first Bluey episodes. That was before the first Bluey series had been green lit. That also meant that when we started production, I had a whole bunch of scripts up my sleeve. I wouldn't have been able to do that without the extra income that Dan the Man had brought in. Something like that was unthinkable before then.
The release of the Dan the Man game built up a really loyal audience who then got into the series. Now we have an amazing fan-base who want more of the show, and want more of the game. Unfortunately for Dan the Man once Bluey arrived my attention was and has been almost wholly taken up by that except for carving out time for this new series, while Halfbrick continues to work on creating a great game.
I’m still really strongly connected to the game. My kids will play Dan the Man every now and then, and one of them said to me the other day, ‘This is the best thing you've ever done’. Alright - I guess I'll take it.
That’s so cool! Going back to the DTM series – the pilot episode followed a pretty conventional idea of a game – albeit in an unconventional way. But then along comes Josie, and she seems to disrupt that idea. Who or what was the inspiration for Josie?
Joe I knew if Dan the Man was going to go beyond that one-joke short film, I needed a character who was capable of being a character. My main character is hamstrung by the fact that they can't talk. The only interactions they can do are what a video game character can do. There’s no emotional point to this, which is what a story needs. But in a game all you want to do is get to the next stage, right?
And that's what I like about it. That's the strength of Dan. It's funny because it's just like, what the hell is this game that I've bought that's making me do all this weird life stuff? I just want to beat people up. So that's funny, but it's that's only funny if you're just immersed in this full-on story, where people are having their own lives and problems. And that’s extra funny because you don't expect it in these types of games.
So I needed a character who had this drama going on, someone who would be capable of being upset, and capable of having a story, and that’s Josie.
It was a lot of fun just figuring out what that story is. And, you know, a lot of the humour and the pathos comes from the fact that Josie’s fallen in love with this dude who really just wants to get to the next stage, and is incapable of emotions.
Dan ends up I guess somewhat begrudgingly following Josie’s story, trying to help her out. And then of course, later, things get a little bit more in-depth as things develop between them.
Dan eventually realises this is a weird game, then suddenly it's an online game and he meets the other girl, a player called Ana, which I thought was quite a nice thing you could do in a game like this.
So you have an NPC – Josie – falling in love with someone, but who can’t compete with this other girl – Ana - who is an actual girl. Because Dan knows Josie’s not real. There's something quite tragic about that. It's a very weird little world to play in, but I enjoy taking it to those to those places.
There’s a lot of range and diversity in the work that you’ve done. Are there any common ideas that inform your projects?
Joe I've always just done what feels meaningful to me, and what feels funny to me. I'm very influenced by The Simpsons and South Park - that generation of cartoons that I grew up on through my teenage years and through my 20s.
Most of my career has been spent working on other people's shows, but when I do make my own short films, I'm a very curious person. I don't like to keep things on a surface level. You know what I mean? I like to poke around in psychology and religion and stuff… and I love action. I love all those 80s video games.
Mainstream taste isn't the right phrase, but there's nothing particularly art house about what I do. I'm just trying to tell good, funny action stories, and find a slightly unique way to do it. Something that's interesting that I haven't seen before.
I always enjoyed making short films - I mean, back before our kids came along, when I had a bit of spare time. As an animator, there was always downtime between seasons of shows when you're out of work and I like to fill that time with a project. I never really had the excuse not to be working on a short film.
I always wanted to make my own series and Dan the Man just came out of that. I’d chip away at it on my laptop at night. So yeah - in that pre-kids time where you can just knock out a short film and it's no worries, you know?
How do you feel about Dan the Man in relation to the other work you’ve done?
Joe I’ve spent about seventy percent of my working life doing work for other people. But Bluey and Dan the Man and a little handful of shorts were what I did when I found myself able to write and make my own stuff. I've done a hell of a lot of service work that I'm proud of, but what I'm proudest of are the things I get to write, direct and create. And there's not many of them except Dan the Man and Bluey that I've done in the last 10 years and so.
There's a bit of me in both of these shows. Whilst they're very different, I like to think they're irreverent and that they try to do their own thing, play with the format that they're in, and be a bit surprising.
They both hold a special place in my heart.
