Justin Roiland Almost Didn’t Voice The Main Gun In High On Life

High on Life is a new title by Squanch Games. This development studio was founded in 2005. Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, When I played their last game, Trover Saves the Universe, a few years ago, I was surprised by how naturally Roiland’s brand of improvised dialogue translated to video game form. Characters would ramble on as long as you stuck around to listen, and I would find myself standing in certain spots for upwards of five or six minutes, just listening to Roiland (who voiced many characters, Trover included) riff on one joke over and over again. While High on Life and Trover are two very different games, Roiland’s style of comedy is featured heavily in both. Roiland and Erich Meyr were both kind enough to let me talk with them about their original plans for this game.

Meyr interjects and echoes the team, “It’s kind of our signature at this point.”

Roiland eventually agreed because of the hard work of his team. “I have to be wrong if everyone else is saying that,” he continues. “So I was like, alright, I’ll do it. And I knew that it would be helpful from a production standpoint for me to do it.”

Justin Roiland voices the guns and Kenny is fired by the player.

Roiland’s voice was so numerous in Trover Saves the Universe, because the original dialogue was meant to be replaced at a later stage of the development cycle. The team ultimately decided to keep it in, both because it wasn’t worth the work to rerecord all of it and because they thought it was funny enough already.

“Trover was like 70% improv, 30% script, probably something like that,” Roiland said, unsure of the exact ratio. “This game is definitely the opposite. But there’s still fun improv.”

“Especially with the guns,” Meyr says. “A lot of the guns do improv.”

The guns in question are High on Life’s main narrative gimmick. There are a variety of talking guns that you can find throughout the world. Each one is voiced and interpreted by a different comedian. Roiland told me that when they started casting for these odd roles, they usually knew what they were looking for.

“JB Smoove was definitely someone I wanted from the get-go,” Roiland says. “Tim Robinson was another… our head writer Alec Robbins is friends with him. So he was just like, ‘hey do you want to do this?’ and [Robinson] is like, ‘yeah, I’ll do it’ without even really realizing what he was getting himself into.”

JB Smoove voices Gus.

Betsy Sodaro, who auditioned for the part, completed a cast Roiland said is equal to a quality animated comedy. High on Life has a narrative structure that is much more intricate than the simple dialogue in an episode. Rick and Morty.

For example, a mechanic this game shares with Trover is “opt-in” dialogue. It’s what Squanch calls a scene where players can leave at any time, even when the other characters are still talking: the player is in charge of how much of the dialogue they want to experience, and NPCs respond to their behavior appropriately. Squanch Games’ work on Trover gave them an idea for the structure of those types of scenes and made the writing process smoother.

“You can stand near them, and they’re aware that you’re there, and then when you leave, they’re aware that you’re leaving,” Roiland says. “Writing all that stuff is just thinking about how the player could potentially interrupt or re-engage. If they do something, how does the NPC respond?”

High on Life offers an example of such a scene in the section where the player meets the Mac and Cheese Brothers, an alien group. A typical scenario is for a player to approach the brothers and then decide what they want. However, Meyr says, “When we were playtesting, we had someone who just from a distance shot a special ability and blew them all up before even meeting them. And we’re like, ‘okay, well, that’s a thing someone might do, right? Let’s write a line for that.”

As much work as they’ve done predicting player behavior, Roiland says he could see them going another year just adding more details. The project was so ambitious that they tripled the studio’s staff from about 20 to 60 to pull it off, and they still cut plenty of content.

“There’s tons of stuff,” Roiland says when I ask what didn’t make it in. “What’s interesting about those, though, is that sometimes you’ll come back to them… For sure on Rick and MortyThere are episodes from almost every season that were created in the same way as season 1 or 2. [to] with fresh eyes… and then suddenly it clicks.”

Justin Roiland was the founder and CEO of Squanch Games.

“It’s actually surprising how much we did get in,” Meyr says. “A lot of ideas are like kind of nuts.” He didn’t mention it here, but one of the most surprising things that did make it in were four full-length movies licensed to appear in the game and play on TVs in the background. The two developers didn’t want to list specific cut content in case it comes back one day, but I can’t help but wonder — if four full movies made the cut, what didn’t?

The game is now available for the public. This is an exciting moment for Meyr.

“It’s great to see it so complete, you know,” Meyr says. “Because there’s so many cycles of focusing on what’s broken… and then in this last month, you kind of have to take your little dev goggles off and be like, ‘Oh that’s the game, right?’”

Meyr claims that watching streamsers play his game is his favorite way to spend the time after it launches. Before Twitch, they would have to wait for reviews and then maybe hear some people mention it online, but watching someone tackle it on launch day is “much more immediately gratifying, which is just really cool.”

After hearing about Meyr’s passionate love of launch day streamers, Roiland pauses for a moment, then says, “Yeah, I don’t do it.” When I ask why, he says, “I’ve lived it and seen it so much that like, I’m good. I’m good. I’m excited people are playing it… I just need some distance.” It’s not an opinion exclusive to games either — he feels that way about all of his creative projects. He and Meyr also agree that it takes them a few years after launch before they can properly enjoy a game they’ve worked on.

That doesn’t mean they’re not satisfied with this project, though. “I’m really proud of where we landed with this one,” Roiland says. “All the crazy ideas, it’s just insane. It’s been insanely exhausting. It’s cool because we all have been living with this thing and believing in it for years and years.”

You can now get High on Life on Xbox Series X/S or Xbox One and on PC via Game Pass. You can find more details in our interview with the rooftop crew from this year.