Studio MDHR talks about the surprise of bringing Cuphead to Switch, the challenge of porting, and Nintendo's input

Cuphead coming to the Switch was a surprise to many, many Nintendo and Microsoft fans. Turns out it was a surprise to Studio MDHR as well! In an interview with USGamer, Jared Moldenhauer, Studio MDHR co-founder and lead game designer, talks about how the port came to be.

"It's a surprise to us too. It was something to do with Nintendo and Microsoft obviously working things out, finding friendly middle ground and the general sense was that they wanted more people exploring and playing games. So like, the more people who can enjoy an indie game is more important than exclusivity. I don't know internally how that worked for them—beats me—but when the opportunity arose for us and was like you can be on Switch, of course we jumped on it. It's pretty stellar to have the chance."

Bringing Cuphead to Switch was no easy task, but it turns out the work done on this version will benefit the game across all platforms.

"You have to reapproach some of the ways you had it set up in a new way, because we didn't want to bog it down and it would have been insane loading times. So basically it was just finding a new way to pack all the sprite atlases and how to approach that, but the benefit was, sure it's a lot of work to do that for the Switch, but now across the board everything will have quicker loading time too. So it was just like, a win and a win and only good for the fans of the game."

Moldenhauer also threw some praise at Nintendo themselves for the port. Studio MDHR worked in collaboration with Nintendo's Nindie team when questions arose, and Moldenhauer said Nintendo was always very quick to respond.