A new Xbox Anniversary Update for Cuphead is launching September 29 exclusively for game owners on Xbox and Windows.
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Cuphead’s Xbox Anniversary Update Brings a Bevy of Behind-the-Scenes Content Exclusively to Xbox Fans
Published
September 27, 2023
Summary
- A new Xbox Anniversary Update for Cuphead is launching September 29 exclusively for game owners on Xbox and Windows.
- Studio MDHR crafted this “love letter” as a thank you to the Xbox community for being some of the first to experience this groundbreaking ID@Xbox game.
- The Xbox Anniversary Update includes over 100 never-before seen hi-res photos extracted from the MDHR archive, behind-the-scenes video features, the entire Cuphead soundtrack, and more!
Cuphead fans are in for a very special treat later this week — this Friday, September 29, Studio MDHR will deploy a special “Xbox Anniversary Update” exclusively on Xbox and Windows that will bring a “love letter” to fans with a new Bonus menu that includes an Art Gallery, Music Player, and Behind-the-Scenes video player to
Cuphead!
This content will include over 100 hi-res photos extracted from the MDHR archives, showing off never-before-seen concepts and unused art pieces, and the entire
Cuphead soundtrack – 86 tracks that will be playable for the first time in one place! And while you navigate through the stylized menus that tap into that iconic, 1930s animated style that
Cuphead nails so well, a new, never-before-heard MIDI demo track from Kris Maddigan will be playing in the background.
Settling on the contents of what would go into the Xbox Anniversary Update was no small feat. As the team shared with Xbox Wire, one of the great byproducts of a game like
Cuphead, where so much of what you see was done with physical materials, is the fact that they end up with tons of material in the vault.
“Original sketches, concept art, process footage of painting or model work, unused music tracks, orchestra session footage, you name it,” says Studio MDHR Co-Director Chad Moldenhauer. “Knowing that we wanted to give our thanks to the Xbox community that has shown us love from day 1, we really thought about the kinds of things we would want to see as fans of
Cuphead. The goal was to make this update feel like a real peek behind the scenes at what went into bringing the game to life, across all parts of development!”
“We thought it would be fun to give this to our Xbox community as a gift on the game’s anniversary, as our Cuphead journey really started with the release on Xbox.”
Studio MDHR Co-Director Chad Moldenhauer
“When it comes to the kindness and support the Xbox community has shown us all these years – all the way back to the very first teasers and snippets of
Cuphead – no amount of thanks feels like enough,” says Studio MDHR Studio Director Maja Moldenhauer. “We really consider this update just a small token of our immense gratitude, and hope that everyone enjoys it as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together!”
The idea of releasing these bonus features as the Xbox Anniversary Update was really a situation of the timing working out perfectly.
”We thought it would be fun to give this to our Xbox community as a gift on the game’s anniversary, as our
Cuphead journey really started with the release on Xbox,” says Chad. “In game development, plans like that don’t always work out, but we were fortunate that all our testing and finalization for the update seemed to finish with enough time to launch on the game’s sixth birthday!”
There’s a lot of special, never-before-seen content in store for players. For this update, they made the decision to give Xbox players a first-ever peek at some of the earliest “MS Paint-style” art they created as they would go through the early design concepts for certain attacks and character moments.
“With our process being so painstaking once we put pencil to paper, we often use paint tools during brainstorming sessions to communicate ideas very quickly to one another for the broad strokes of a boss attack or phase transition,” explains Chad. “A few of these made their way into the photo gallery, and we think they’re a fun break from tradition for the more handcrafted art we usually put out!”
When it came to scoping out what would be included in the Xbox Anniversary Update, it was done in true Studio MDHR fashion – in that this update was very much a case of wanting to get the fine details
just right.
“We really wanted the experience of browsing the gallery, or listening to the music, or watching the behind-the-scenes videos to be like players had opened a doorway into the MDHR offices during the making of the game.”
Studio MDHR Co-Director Jared Moldenhauer
“One thing we knew from the beginning was that we didn’t want an update like this to be just a series of menus,” explains Maja. “A lot of work went into concepting and designing spaces that felt tactile and fun to explore, like you were visiting the real spaces where the work on
Cuphead was done.”