Things change a lot in game development. Entire segments get cut, characters who were part of the concept phase never make it into the final product, and sometimes mechanics that were meant to be touchstones of the moment-to-moment disappear after a particularly intense meeting. Dispatch’s best scene, however, was always part of AdHoc Studio’s superhero workplace comedy.
In Episode five, “Team Building,” protagonist Robert Robertson III goes from chatting with his team of reformed villains over a headset behind an office desk to joining them in a villain bar called the Sardine. Though Robert has (temporarily) retired from his time as a crime-fighting hero, the patrons at the bar don’t take too kindly to his presence, and things get violent. The bar fight that follows is one of Dispatch’s most memorable sequences, both for its violent excess and its cramming some of its best jokes and character showcases into a fleeting five-minute frenzy.
So how did AdHoc manage to pull this scene off? That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with co-directors Dennis Lenart and Chris Rebbert, who told me that, while episode five’s bar fight was always meant to be a tentpole moment in Dispatch’s story in which Robert won over his team of ex-criminals on their own turf, it actually came together fairly late in the game’s development because the Z-Team itself was still being finalized.
“We actually ended up doing a lot of the action scenes last because we were figuring out the powers of everyone along the way,” Lenart said. “As we were working on the dispatch shift mechanic, we were constantly iterating and sometimes swapping powers between heroes if someone was too overpowered. So, a lot of the actiony stuff, especially the bar fight, we wanted to leave until a little bit later, so all the sort of cement had dried for the characters.”
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
Putting a group of super-powered heroes into a small space like a bar is not an easy task, and coming up with individual setpieces and mini-narratives for each of them required a complete and solidified team with definitive powers. Some characters didn’t make it into the game, including one who had ice-based powers that were storyboarded in an early mock-up of the bar fight. But even the characters that were in the final game weren’t entirely set in stone. Malevola, the devilish woman who can open portals, was originally telepathic and able to read people’s “bad” thoughts, which would have changed how she used her talents in a bar fight.
“There was like two guys, she’d basically made one goon admit to the other goon that he was in love with his girlfriend or something like that,” Rebbert said.
Some of the smaller moments were tweaked over the course of development as Z-Team members solidified, but some of the bar fight’s most effective tricks weren’t in the original script at all. The scene uses a non-linear structure, showing Robert and his crew decompressing at a legally distinct Taco Bell after a fight the player never saw unfold. Then, as Robert tries to make the most of his late-night dinner, Dispatch gives you QTEs that transition from food preparation to the unseen violent bar brawl. The original pitch was much more straightforward.
“I think it was Dennis’ idea, and we were looking at films like The Wrestler, [which] was a big influence,” Rebbert said. “There’s this locker room scene where they have a match and it keeps cutting back and forth with them getting staples taken out of their head, and then it cuts in to show how that happened in the actual match. We looked at more samples from that. I found one from 30 Rock, which is one of my favorite shows. There’s a scene where Kenneth has a party in that show, and then nobody talks about it and just cuts to the aftermath where everybody’s looking at each other in the cold light of day, and all the things they did to one another. We just like that energy, right? It was just unexpected, and it kind of opened up what we could do with the QTE system.”
Fourth meal
Those “unexpected” QTEs include Robert putting a straw in his drink only to hard cut to stabbing a goon in the face with a handful of darts, tearing a cybernetic implant out of someone’s head when you were supposed to be opening a sauce packet, and biting a baddie’s thumb off instead of the end of your taco.
“I think the straw might have been the first one,” Lenart said. “I was just like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if you were doing this mundane thing that turned into some horrific thing?’ Then Chris and I started talking like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s interesting. Well, maybe, in order to do that, you’d have to have this flashback structure.’ I think originally we planned like, five or six flashbacks.”
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
The violence is a funny, gross-out gag, but it was also an attempt to make sure Dispatch’s QTEs weren’t a “chore.” Compared to the team’s work at Telltale on games like The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us, where “everything stops in the middle of a chaotic scene” while the game waits for a player’s input, Lenart said he wanted Dispatch’s action to flow and be “as entertaining as watching a good action scene in a TV show.” Rebbert added that relying on those slowed-down action sequences would have felt especially odd given the team-based fight scenes in Dispatch.
“We’re cognizant of what we always call internally ‘The Woody Windup,’” Rebbert said. “It’s a reference to Wolf Among Us, where the villain goes like this [imitates a slowed-down winding up for a punch], and it just kills the pacing. I think in this context specifically, it was like, ‘well, what the hell is the Z team doing?’ Well, they’re waiting for you to punch this guy. We’re trying to combat those shortcomings that we found with the mechanic in the past.”
Comparatively, Dispatch’s action scenes, though a bit more sparse than the average Telltale game, are more fluid, which gives AdHoc more opportunities to pull off fast-paced, comical violence when it fits while also letting the player participate in something precise and choreographed.
“The sort of arc of the interactivity of the scene is to shock you at first, then go up one level with the second flashback,” Lenart said. “Then the third time, where he lifts the taco to his mouth, the hope was that people would be sitting there going, ‘Oh God, what is he going to do?’”
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
Based on the reactions of players and streamers, Rebbert and Lenart reckon those gory back-and-forths accomplished what they set out to do, though they were worried people might hate the entire scene. The three moments that are in the game are only half of the ones the team planned for, which was partially due to budgetary concerns. Dispatch’s animation pipeline is comparable to an animated film, according to Lenart, which means that scenes like the bar fight got so expensive that AdHoc had to cut frames and seconds of the scene to fit it into its runtime and budget.
Budget restrictions, in this case, worked in the scene’s favor. The structure was partially envisioned to “relieve the burden” of animating the fight from beginning to end, which Lenart says allowed them to look for “just the highlights” of each section. This is why Robert can be doing something terribly violent to a completely different villain at each transition, as it’s implied you’re jumping into a much longer fight when it’s getting good. However, some pretty major gameplay moments ended up getting scrapped in the process, from narrative choices to a live, in-person riff on the game’s dispatch mechanics.
“There was a valiant effort to try to do—we called it ‘Live Action Dispatching’ where Robert was sort of like Coach Cartering in the bar fight,” Rebbert said. “Players could choose to send Malevola that way, send Punch Up that way, and it just became too unruly, and it was like one of those things where the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, production-wise.”
One cut segment had players choosing whether to team up with one member of the Z-Team or the other as the fight got dicey, which would have led to some character-specific moments that didn’t make it into the final game.
“One beat that I’m kind of glad got cut was a point where Robert actually comes out of the bathroom after he’s fighting, and there was a choice that we ended up excising was you saw that Prism was on stage and a shapeshifter had taken the form of one of her holograms, so it was sneaking up on her,” Rebbert said. “Then on the other side of the bar, Punch Up, I can’t remember exactly what was happening with Punch Up, but it was a choice on who to save, right? Who do you go after, and it just ended up being one of those things that felt a little bit more arbitrary, which I think ultimately is why we excised it, but there were fun beats around it where Robert gets in a fight with the Prism hologram if you go on Prism’s side. Then Prism jumps in and saves you, but it’s clear that she just took a guess and accidentally saved you.”
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
Some characters were cut from the fight, both because of their conditional status as Z-team members and because they narratively didn’t fit the scene’s scrappy vibe. Waterboy and Phenomaman, two heroes the player can choose to add to their team earlier in the season, are omitted from most of it
“We ended up deciding that they don’t get involved for various reasons,” Rebbert said. “A, because they’re not villains, and B, because of where they were story-wise in there. Phenomaman is depressed, and Waterboy hasn’t come into his own yet as a hero, so it kind of made sense to put either of them in a cage.”
Making the most of five minutes
When you’re working in such a short, five-minute window, AdHoc had to be economic and strategic with the moments it did include, which means that most of one-liners and gags came straight from the script, rather than being improvised. Rebbert jokes that he would be “surprised if [the voice actors] even understood what was happening,” as the chaotic scene was still without visuals during the voice recording sessions. This included Prism’s now iconic “The fuck you mean, ‘temporarily?’ Bitch, you blind foreva” line when she uses her light powers on a goon who exclaims that she “temporarily blinded” him.
While her incredible line is not improv, Prism is one of the stars of the fight because her voice is in the background of the entire brawl. The light-manipulating pop star hero is singing “Hoes Depressed” by Thot Squad throughout the fight (Prism is voiced by Thot Squad rapper Blvck Bunnie). Thot Squad’s music is featured multiple times in Dispatch, but the cheerleader-like, singsongy “Hoes Depressed” has become synonymous with the bar fight’s rowdy roughhousing. According to Rebbert, Thot Squad’s music was already in consideration for Dispatch‘s soundtrack before Prism was cast in the role, and once the team realized that a microphone was going to be in the room during the bar fight, one thing led to another, and “Hoes Depressed” became the soundtrack of the scrimmage.
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
“She was just so much fun and full of energy and just so excited to be there, too,” Rebbert said. “Once those things happened, it was like, ‘Well, now we’re definitely going to put a song of hers [in the game]. She’s gonna be on stage singing because we don’t get a chance to do that otherwise in the scene.’ Karaoke was already in the script, and then it was like, ‘Well, there’s a microphone right there. We have a pop star. Why would she be doing anything else right now?’”
Prism isn’t the only Z-teamer singing at the Sardine, though. Flambae, the flamboyant, flame-manipulating ex-villain, also has his moment singing an embellished version of Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch.” At first, Flambae sings an antagonistic rewrite of the 1997 rock anthem that turns the “Bitch” from a self-referential term of endearment into a derogatory one aimed squarely at his boss.
I’m a bitch, my name’s Robert
Such a bitch, whose name is Robert
I’m a bitch, yeah I’m a bitch
I’m such a fucking bitch
I have no hopes, I have no dreams
And a tiny little peen
And it doesn’t even function anyway
Because I have erectile dysfunction
At first, Flambae was going to sing a completely different song, but Rebbert and Lenart were hesitant to name it when I asked them what it was. This mystery song would have served the same role, juxtaposing the much heavier flashbacks of an old fight between Flambae and Robert in which the hero severed the fire-bender’s fingers with a cheery-sounding song everyone knows.
“It’s one of those things where you’re like, ‘Maybe we can get this. This band probably has enough money that they don’t really care about charging a ton for some weird indie game to use this thing,’” Lenart said. “Once the rights were investigated, it was just immediately shut down. There’s no way we could ever afford it.”
Rebbert said that this mystery song was the “first idea” and “more of the obvious choice,” but AdHoc had a “whole spreadsheet” of song ideas and spent months investigating other songs. Whatever they chose had to be a song “enough people [would] be able to recognize from jump.” Rebbert says he takes full credit for using “Bitch,” which he said is a song he sometimes sings to his wife as an inside joke (in first person, thus referring to himself as the titular “Bitch,” he stresses).
“Once it was clear that that could be an option, I was like, ‘Guys, I’m not gonna entertain other songs,’ and everybody else had to put up with me,” Rebbert said.
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
Though they were able to get the rights to “Bitch,” the process of getting it and Flambae’s cover into the game itself was another ordeal. Rebbert rewrote the lyrics, but Flambae voice actor Lance Cantstopolis ended up deviating from it and improvising a full version of the song heard in the episode’s credits.
“Obviously, a lot of the stuff is written and nailed down months in advance, and then with some of the actors, you also just kind of go, ‘cool, just give me some of your takes on these different lines,’” Lenart said. “[Cantstopolis is] one of the ones that loves it, and then you just kind of want to like let him loose and just say ‘Do what you want.’ I feel like, with a lot of the actors who recorded, we get four hours of voice files from them at the end; he has probably eight hours of stuff. He’ll just riff on everything and keep going, and it’s sad that it’ll never see the light of day, but it’s hilarious for us just to go through the folders and just listen to all the, all the hilarious stuff he said.”
However, the “Bitch” instrumental Cantstopolis riffs over is a homebrew MIDI made by Lenart because AdHoc “couldn’t pay for the karaoke recording” along with acquiring the rights. When Lenart was syncing Flambae’s vocals to his makeshift instrumental, he found Cantstopolis’ improvised version that made it into the credits.
“I was like, ‘Holy crap, this is so funny,”’ Lenart said. “I just started sending it to Chris, Nick, and a bunch of folks like just being like, ‘Isn’t this hilarious? Like, God, he just did the whole thing, and there’s so much great stuff in here.’”
The devil’s in the details
Flambae isn’t shown as much in the bar fight itself because the brawl is chaotic enough, and filled with small moments spotlighting each member of the Z-Team. Punch Up uses his short stature to punch the dick of every goon he can, leading to one guy voiced by Rebbert shouting “He’s only punching dicks!” over the noise of the bar. Malevola throws a grunt through a portal after he remarks that he’s “totally into” being choked by her devil tail, and Golem, who isn’t allowed into the bar at first, uses that portal to come and wreck shop with his giant mud-filled arms.
Dispatch’s commitment to its rehabilitated scoundrels’ personalities comes through in most environments, but a bar is also the perfect stage for showcasing a cast of this size, especially when they’re mostly together in a workplace.
“You have a few drinks, you let your guard down, you’re having fun, you loosen up—it’s the antithesis of an office environment,” Rebbert said. “I mean, not that this team by any means behaves properly according to HR protocol, but you know, it’s really we kind of let your hair down. Public houses and watering holes have always been a place where people kind of come together.”
© AdHoc Studio / Kotaku
The bar was especially helpful in illustrating the contrast between Robert’s stoic, well-mannered heroics and his untamable crew. Lenart points to the clean, local Crypto Night bar seen in Dispatch’s first episode as a stark contrast between the person Robert has always been and the Sardine’s seedy underbelly he’s trying to navigate now. To the team, this was the best place to finally let Robert and the Z-Team see each other as equals because getting over that barrier wouldn’t be easy.
“The goal of the episode was to have Robert win over the Z-team and cross a relationship barrier with them, for lack of a better way of describing it,” Rebbert said. “It just felt appropriate to put him in enemy territory and make that as hard for him as possible. This is a place that’s their old stomping grounds. He’s an ex-hero.”
Despite all of AdHoc’s fears about whether or not the bar fight would work, it’s one of the most memorable sequences in this first season. Lenart says that all that worry was worth it.
“I stuck my neck out for that one,” Lenart said. “I was like, ‘I think this could be funny, we’ll see.’ I think even internally, folks who were used to the original version of the more linear bar fight also had some apprehension internally about it. It was taking a bet of like, ‘Do people think this is funny or really just dumb and annoying?’ I was stressing about that moment for, I don’t know, the last six or seven months. The first playthroughs I was watching, it was like, ‘okay, here we go.’ Then, seeing reactions being positive and people enjoying it, it was like, ‘Now, whatever happens with the rest of the season is fine.’
Dispatch’s eight-episode season is available now on PC and PlayStation 5.
