Trey Parker and Matt Stone have made it no secret that the production of the South Park television show is a hectic one, with an entire documentary detailing their process called Six Days to Air. In the past couple of years, the two have taken the product outside of the television realm and into the video game world, creating the 2014 hit RPG South Park: Stick of Truth and mobile game South Park: Phone Destroyer. With their next game, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, releasing soon, the duo revealed the struggle of producing the sequel and how the tv show hindered its production.
In an interview with IGN’s Ryan Mccaffery, Parker and Stone talked about all they’ve learned since venturing into the industry in 2014.
“[In] the Stick of Truth, originally, there was a branching out of factions,” Parker said. “So you went and did a whole thing with the goth kids, you did a whole thing with Ike and the pirates. It was all about all these factions and it just started to get completely unwieldy in terms of writing it and everything. If we understood the DLC concept well enough.
Stone went on to add that they eventually realized they were making the wrong game, starting out trying to make an open world adventure like Skyrim instead of a more linear story.
It’s an interesting time at the South Park Digital Studios’ Marina del Rey currently, as not only are they preparing everything for the pending release of South Park: The Fractured But Whole, they are also in the midst of producing the shows 21st season. Mccaffery caught up with Supervising Producer for South Park, Frank C. Agnone II, to talk about how they juggled the show and the game, and the problems it caused.
“Because of the dysfunctional way we go about producing the TV show, the collaboration with Ubisoft on The Fractured But Whole had to be tight. We got better at it as we went along,” Agnone said. “Matt and Trey wrote the equivalent of four or five feature films [for this game].” Thousands of jokes got written, but they were edited down to the very best.”
South Park: The Fractured But Whole comes out on October 17, 2017, for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.