An interview between Darrel of The Nintendo Jump Podcast and Liquid Bit’s Adam Walters and Mike Chorak. Liquid Bit is the developer of Killer Queen Black.
Darrel: Today, I am super excited to be joined with two members from Liquid Bit, Adam and Mike. How are you guys?
Adam: Good!
Mike: Doing well, thanks.
Mike: Doing well, thanks.
Darrel: For anybody who’s not aware at this point, Liquid Bit is the developer of Killer Queen Black which is, as you guys know, Nintendo Jump Podcast’s Game of the Month for October. So, all this month we’ve been talking about it and this is going to be linked to our full review of the game itself and its final breakdown. To jump in quickly, can you guys talk about your involvement with the game, like your different roles?
Adam: Sure. So I’m the CTO, Mike is the Chief Architect, but we’re a studio of three. Matt Tesch is our CEO and does all the production and coordinating between all the different people, like contractors, ourselves, and features. Mike and I are primarily in the code developing.
Darrel: So you guys are going to be the ones that will be able to get into all the balancing and how we actually got this game. That’s great. Can you tell us a little bit about Liquid Bit, like how did you guys come to be? What did you work on, that kind of thing?
Mike: Yeah, that’s an interesting story, actually. It kind of goes back quite a ways, but to give you the skinny of it, the three of us (me, Matt, and Adam), we used to work together at a company called ÄKTA. I actually worked with Matt at a company before that called Fueled. We merged with ÄKTA, and Adam came on. Our company got acquired by Salesforce so we’ve been working together for a long time. We used to build mobile apps, actually. We were building iPhone apps, and one of our clients from Texas was like “hey, I’ve got some capital, I want to build a video game. I don’t know what you’re doing at Salesforce, but if you want, let’s start a company and see what we can make of it.” So that was three years ago. And it’s like a really weird story. This never happens, right? But yeah, we did. We put in our two weeks notice and started this. Been doing it ever since. I went to school for game programming, Adam didn’t have any game development experience, but we worked on a lot of stuff together and we were confident that we could do something that wasn’t a full AAA shooter or something, you know?
Mike: Yeah, that’s an interesting story, actually. It kind of goes back quite a ways, but to give you the skinny of it, the three of us (me, Matt, and Adam), we used to work together at a company called ÄKTA. I actually worked with Matt at a company before that called Fueled. We merged with ÄKTA, and Adam came on. Our company got acquired by Salesforce so we’ve been working together for a long time. We used to build mobile apps, actually. We were building iPhone apps, and one of our clients from Texas was like “hey, I’ve got some capital, I want to build a video game. I don’t know what you’re doing at Salesforce, but if you want, let’s start a company and see what we can make of it.” So that was three years ago. And it’s like a really weird story. This never happens, right? But yeah, we did. We put in our two weeks notice and started this. Been doing it ever since. I went to school for game programming, Adam didn’t have any game development experience, but we worked on a lot of stuff together and we were confident that we could do something that wasn’t a full AAA shooter or something, you know?
