// PC GAMER — GAMING
Brigador devs think it's crucial that their abrasive, hardcore mech sims aren't for everyone: 'I think we make boy slop, but that's okay'
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When I recently spoke to Stellar Jockeys lead artist Jack Monahan and lead designer Hugh Monahan about Brigador Killers, a big focus for me was approachability versus depth. Most of my favorite games are super-crusty and complex RPGs or immersive sims, and the studios that made them—Troika, Looking Glass, Obsidian, to name a few—often found sustained financial success difficult or impossible.
You need some level of mainstream buy-in to keep the lights on, but something that's too focus-tested or homogenized won't please anyone. Stellar Jockeys' first game, Brigador, is a hardcore mech sim that initially bombed sales-wise, but is now a cult classic, so the Monahans are well-positioned to comment on the subject.
I appreciated the philosophical stance they had toward people who bounce off Brigador and Killers. "We love our games, we're very in this world," said Jack, "But you only need to have an encounter with your mom or someone else's mom to realize none of this makes sense, and we're all speaking Greek all the time."
They see getting people to buy into it all as a design challenge, but don't begrudge the ones for whom it doesn't click. "We had a vtuber recently, she streamed Brigador Killers," Jack recalled. "It wasn't quite her [thing]. She's very polite. She said, 'This is not really for me.'
"People kept asking her in the chat … And she just goes, 'I don't care about mechs! I care about the engineers! I care about the people who pilot them! Give me that stuff. All this mech stuff, it's all boy slop!'
"I think we make boy slop, but that's okay. First of all, somebody's got to do it, but I think for us, it's the willingness to get that crunchy with stuff."
Even if a lot of players may not pick up what they're putting down, Jack argued that there's just not enough room in the current market for games that aren't born of real passion, and that creative compromises can also have unintended side effects.
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"I think the great irony is that, when you're trying to deliver what you think people want, you're actually holding a weird mirror not to them, but to yourself," he said. "It creates this weird inversion of saying, 'Actually, I think you're idiots, and I think you're idiots in this way, and so here's what I think idiots want.'"