Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘Dude Where Is My Beer’

Review Fix chats with “Dude Where Is My Beer” developer Arik Zurabian, who lets us know what inspired the fun point-and-click adventure and more.

Review Fix: How was this game born?

Arik Zurabian: It started when I one day decided to spend all the time I spend checking Facebook on a hobby which would be fun to work with a few times a week. At first, I wanted to create a small game about people I know in Oslo, who I almost always met in the bars.

Review Fix: What was your role in the game?

Zurabian: I made the first draft version of the game alone, with all the dialog, but with no sounds and with dummy graphics, and thought an illustrator could make all the graphics, so I just could replace them. Then Edo Brenes, the illustrator, showed up and he said basically “I like your concept, but we will need to fix the story…” and I realized that instead of having my friends as the characters in the game, with all that internal humor, we should make it interesting for a bigger audience. After a few rounds with Edo, it became a satiric story about craft beers, beards and all the hipster clichés. 

Review Fix: How did you get involved in the industry?

Zurabian: I have worked in the IT for over ten years, both as an animator and low key developer, and actually had all kinds of roles in different startups, so I could just easily combine these roles. But I wouldn’t say I am involved in the game industry, I am just making a game and would like to see how it will turn out. 

Review Fix: What was development like?

Zurabian: Even though it took a lot of time in the beginning on testing different ways to do things, changing existing things several times, it’s an amazing feeling when I find solutions and can see that the game is being developed further. And testing the completed parts hundreds of times is pure happiness.

Review Fix: How did you marry all these different genres?

Zurabian: Well, I just reused the verbs panel from Monkey Island, added a lot of beer-related puzzles (like beer brewing) and changed the concept of saving the world or defeating an evil guy with finding a “regular beer” in the hipster world of craft beers.

Review Fix: What makes this game special?

Zurabian: Its tiny target/age group, I am afraid. Not everyone understands why the character wants to find a pilsner and denies to drink French-Style Sweet Milk Stout. The focus on beer makes the game not very children friendly. But the positive side is that many of these point and click games’ fans are now grown-up people and hopefully they have more strong opinions on craft beer.

Review Fix: What games influenced this one the most?

Zurabian: I am a huge fan of all the old Sierra adventure games, Sam and Max and the Monkey Island games – in that order. And I never managed to complete any of them, because of my bad English at that time (I was born in Moscow) and lack of…internet.

Review Fix: What were the major lessons learned?

Zurabian: I like to say that after so many years in the IT development I know exactly in which order it is most effective to work. But in this case, the wrong thing was to spend so long time on making a version of the game based on a script that was kinda weak and then redo everything. 

Review Fix: Do you think preserving older gameplay mechanics in new games is important?

Zurabian: I don’t wanna sound like one of those conservative older guys, so I think that we can have those older mechanics for ourselves, retro gamers, and the kids can play that new fancy stuff!

Review Fix: What’s your favorite memory as a gamer?

Zurabian:  I remember I pretended to sleep, and when the whole family went to bed, I woke up to play games, and I covered my PC with a pillow, so my father wouldn’t hear the noise of the dial-up modem.

Review Fix: How do you want this game to be remembered?

Zurabian: A few years from now: “Do you know that game called ‘Dude, Where Is My Beer?’? That’s the first game by the guys behind [Super famous game 1] and [Super famous game 2]”  

Review Fix: What’s next?

Zurabian: We still have a lot to do on DWIMB, and since it’s our first game ever, we shouldn’t …do what we do – think about our next adventure game.