Brutal Legend box art unveiled

Electronic Arts has started distributing copies of the official box art for Brutal Legend, which I’m sure you’ll see on pre-order pages everywhere before long. As you’d expect Double Fine has done an excellent job with the artwork — I have a feeling it’s going to draw in more regular Joes than Psychonauts‘ relatively ambiguous box art!

You also may be interested in checking out an image I added to the ‘Concept Art’ gallery last week, which is very likely to be the art behind whatever’s on the back of the box. This came from the official Brutal Legend Twitter page, named ‘BackCover_Final.jpg’.

All looks fantastic to me!

A legendary interview with the creator of Brutal Legend

While Brutal Legend designer Tim Schafer has been doing a lot of interviews on video and such around E3, the vast majority have pretty much echoed each other and not really revealed anything new — thus simply ended up in the Community Tracker.

However, game developer favourite GamesIndustry.biz has conducted a superb interview with Schafer that goes into touches upon quite a lot of subjects. For example, Schafer talks about Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister:

“He was really quiet at first. We hung out for a while, then he just totally opened up and turned out to be a big enthusiast. He collects swords and knives, and we talked about medieval battles. I got to hang out with him a little bit, and he plays videogames. He really likes StarFox.”

Later in the interview, he talks about his past creations such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango:

“When I talk to someone about Grim Fandango, I ask did you finish it? And they say no, and then I go, you got stuck in the forest, right? Because everyone gets stuck in the forest, with the signpost.”

Go right ahead and read the three-page interview.

Voice acting palaver gets internet speculating

Although you’ll already be aware of this if you’ve been keeping tabs on the Community Tracker, the internet has been doing a lot of talking during the past few days about a few tidbits of news concerning Brutal Legend‘s voice talent.

The most major piece of news is that Black Sabbath’s Ronnie James Dio will no longer be voicing a character in Brutal Legend, which many are saying is due to fellow Black Sabbath alumni Ozzy Osbourne who is currently involved in a legal issue over the band’s name, and also appearing in Brutal Legend.

Instead the character Dio played will be performed by high-quality actor Tim Curry, who you’ve almost certainly seen or heard in something else. Brutal Legend designer Tim Schafer says that the Black Sabbath lawsuit isn’t related to the recasting, instead putting it down to the sheer talent of Tim Curry:

“Ronnie James Dio is an amazing singer and truly one of the great figures of metal. But as the character of Doviculus evolved, we realized that Tim Curry was a better fit for the part. Anyone who has seen his amazing performance as the Lord of Darkness in the movie Legend knows why we cast him in the role of Doviculus, Emperor of the Tainted Coil.”

If you’ve seen the ‘Characters’ page you’ll know that Doviculus is as far as we know the ultimate bad guy in Brutal Legend, so I’d say that Tim Curry is quite well suited to this role — probably more so than Dio.

In addition to the above news, rumours thundered through various blogs after Schafer left the following ambiguous post on his Twitter page the other day:

“K, I’m getting on this plane and flying to the UK for one day to meet with someone who’s threatening to cancel. Humanity, don’t let me down!”

Naturally presumptions were made en masse, with every British voice actor in Brutal Legend considered. However, it turns out the worry was completely unwarranted as Schafer followed with another tweet last night:

“Oh, you crazy blogs. I appreciate the concern, but I just meant cancel a recording session. Not cancel themselves from the game.”

What would a Tim Schafer game be without a boatload of drama before its release, eh?

World record for air guitaring set at Download Festival

If you were at Download Festival in the UK this weekend, you may have witnessed the most extreme example of air guitaring ever. Dressed in Brutal Legend t-shirts, an insane 440 people gathered around Electronic Arts’ trailer and played the air guitar to Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ — not only breaking several barriers of sheer awesomeness, but also a Guinness world record.

Kerrang FM’s Christian Stevenson had the following to say:

“That was one of the raddest jams I’ve ever been involved with. The crowd played their air guitars better than Eddie Van Halen! Then they destroyed ’em good and proper. Who cares, right? They can go to the air guitar shop and get another one. Sick to the infinity of sickness! I want a crowd like that at every gig I’m at. Awesometacular — air guitar world records rule!”

With the previous world record of 318 people in tatters, those still feeling up to the exhausting art of the air guitar were able to go on-stage and play against one of the festival’s bands The Blackout, with one of the real-life Tenacious D guitars up for grabs.

I think it’s fair to say that EA knows how to market this game.

Official Brutal Legend site revamped

As the game draws closer to release, Electronic Arts has seen it fit to completely revamp the official Brutal Legend site. Not too much has been added, but things are laid out a bit better and the site does a much better job of showing what the game’s all about.

You’ll also notice that the site now lets you listen to music, using tracks that’ll be in Brutal Legend itself. Unfortunately this means you can’t actually access the site at the moment if you choose certain territories, presumably because of music licensing issues. Choose ‘United States’ for best results.

Just needs a nice link to BRUTAL! and it’ll be perfect!