Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is funny. A funny game! There aren’t that many of those – not really. Gaming famously tries a bit too hard when it comes to comedy; a quick look at Duke Nukem, the latter Borderlands titles, and even that Activision-backed Deadpool game prove that. The games that do genuinely manage to raise a smirk from players are usually steeped in satire, mocking other games and poking fun at archaic formulae in mechanics and storytelling alike (here’s looking at you, Conker).
So what does it take to make a game – and an action game, at that – actually funny? Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy launched in 2021, and quickly became celebrated for its stellar writing. Our own Alex Donaldson even said it was one of the best-written games of the year in the headline for his review. You couldn’t avoid the quality of the writing in Eidos Montreal’s Marvel debut, even if you tried; it was right at the core of the experience. So how did senior narrative director, Mary DeMarle, and her team pull it off? Well, first of all, they came in without any comedy experience.
“When we first got the project I think there was a bit of a struggle of readjusting our mentality,” DeMarle tells me. “For me, it was especially like ‘oh, you want me to write comedy?!’ That’s really scary to me. I do have a sense of humour, but my sense of humour tends to be a little more dark… and when you’re looking at something like Guardians of the Galaxy – where it’s very light-hearted – I was just like ‘oh my god’.”
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