At the end of each track, you will be graded based on accuracy and combo point multipliers. You also get Toots om Trom. to buystiff cards featuring famous trombonists, baboons, and dubious facts (the trumpet is “the coward’s trombone,” according to one entry). Fair warning: If that’s not your sense of humor, this might not be the game for you.
Oh yes, the baboons – there are many in ‘Trombone Champ’, probably more than you expected. And quite a few secrets too.
The game’s developer, Dan Vecchitto, said that while he had hoped the game would do well, he never imagined there would be such a large audience for his crazy trombone playing.
“It’s blown way beyond our expectations,” he said in a video interview with The Washington Post.
Vecchito, whose full-time job is in web design, has been making games in his spare time for over a decade with his wife, Jackie, who works in the same field. Under the name Holy Wow Studios, they have released the Icarus Proudbottom series – typing games in the same faux-edutainment style as “Frog Fractions” – for free online. “Trombone Champ” is their first product for sale.
Its virality has caused some headaches.
“It’s exciting, but it’s also like, oh man, it’s a lot of work,” Vecchito said. He had naively thought there would be less work to do after the game’s release: “Now after release, I have thousands of players wanting updates. So it’s actually a lot more busy.”
He had already planned to add new songs and accessibility options to ‘Trombone Champ’ after its release over time, but now that it has gone viral, he is raising his sights. He plans to further develop the game’s storyline content and is considering several new features such as a level editor. A Mac port was already in the works, but now he’s also exploring what it takes to bring the game to Nintendo Switch. Some fans have speculated what playing the game would be like in virtual reality, which he said hadn’t even been on his radar.
Of course, since it was largely a one-man operation, he hedged that future updates could take a while.
“Trombone Champ” was initially inspired by arcade cabinets. Vecchito built one with his wife for their two-player typing game, “Icarus Proudbottom’s Typing Party,” for an indie convention in 2016.
“It was really fun and I was kind of in the arcade mindset,” he said. “At one point I just had a mental image of an arcade cabinet with the giant rim of a rubber trombone.”
Two years later, he remembered the idea and made a prototype built around using the mouse to mimic the slide of a trombone. He started playing on it, culminating in the decision to make it Holy Wow Studio’s first game to be sold on Steam.
Over its four-year development cycle, “Trombone Champ” developed what Vecchito described as a “small but very devoted and rabid fanbase,” many of whom they knew in real life. During a play test in August that was open to the public via Steam, some players streamed the game live on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, which got even more eyes on it. He had expected the game to do well, perhaps generating some word of mouth if players shared their ridiculous-sounding clips online.
Then came the moment when he realized just how big the game had become: The night after gaming news site PC Gamer posted a review, “Trombone Champ” briefly surpassed “God of War” on Steam’s list of the platform’s best-selling games.
Why the trombone? “It’s a fun instrument by nature,” Vecchito said. ‘I’m not sure why. … It may have to do with the loudness coupled with the inaccuracy. It comes on record with a lot of confidence, but you have no idea what you’re going to get.”
The trombone can also slide between notes, unlike other rhythm playing instruments such as the guitar or drums, making for fun sounds and fluctuations as the player moves from note to note. In practice, he said, the trombone in the game works more like a slide flute than a trombone. At first, Vecchito (who has no experience with the instrument) said he was nervous that real trombonists would be offended by what was essentially “a parody of a trombone”. But the feedback he’s heard so far has been positive, adding that the game is a surprise hit in the ska community, which is already asking for more songs from the genre. “Trombone Champ” currently contains 20 songs, some of the public domain, a few composed by Vecchitto and an original song: “Long-Tail Limbo” by London-based musician Max Tundra, of whom Vecchitto has been a fan for over two years . decades.
As for the baboons, that idea started out as a one-off joke for a feature that never really came into play. Vecchito originally planned to include three different difficulty levels, he explained.
“I wanted to call the easy mode ‘baby’ and the hard mode ‘bonkers,’ but struggled to come up with a good ‘b’ word for the standard difficulty setting,” Vecchito said. “For some reason, the word ‘baboon’ came to mind. It makes no sense, but I thought it was really funny to inexplicably call the default difficulty “baboon”. ”
From then on, he started including the word “baboon” in more and more menu screens for laughs. When he started brainstorming the underlying narrative and non-playable characters of “Trombone Champ,” most of which are hidden in the UI, he knew he had to commit to it.
“I realized it had to be baboons too,” he said.
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