Martians may need moms, but Smurglians crave Slayer.







In “Coffee Crisis,” when evil aliens plan to rob Earth of its metal music, top-quality coffee, cat videos, and all of the Wi-Fi, it falls on two baristas to stop this threat.







The SEGA Genesis game is a joint venture between Pittsburgh's Mega Cat Studios and Black Forge Coffee House and is currently using Kickstarter to push the project across the finish line.







Mega Cat Studios founder James Deighan explains that he and his team have been developing simple games in recent years as a means of learning the mechanics and, getting a feel for developing within the technical limitations of retro systems.









Like many with development experience, Deighan, who has been in IT for about ten years, found himself drawn to trying his hand at video games like the ones he loved growing up, and welcomes the challenge of working with the Genesis, which is harder to develop than other platforms like the ever popular NES.





“It's definitely a passion project, but it's something we're super excited about, and we love what we've gotten out of it. We're excited to bring about the other projects we have in queue to see if we can hit the retro collector fans for not-shovelware, not-simple, but the same sense of nostalgia and joy that you get from a full-featured, commercial release, but in 2016.”







The seeds for Coffee Crisis were planted at the Pittsburgh Retro Gaming Convention where the Mega Cat team met Black Forge.







“We were at a benefit for Children's Hospital, and it was an event that they were vending coffee at, and we were vending, and we got chatting about the whole small business thing. Black Forge is kind of unique and weird struggle of having this very specific niche. Black Forge is a small coffee shop in a not -so-great part of town, where they're part of the rejuvenation effort trying to stimulate the economy there.







“Black Forge didn't have a back-end or qualify for business loan financing, so they did an Indiegogo, to start their coffee shop. They've been operating for just over a year. If they didn't have enough challenges with foot traffic in the area they're in, add in the very eclectic design element of being a metal-themed coffee shop.”







“After meeting them at the event, we just realized we had a ton of things in common. We're both very passion-driven entrepreneurs. We saw eye-to-eye on the whole passion-first ideology, and we started talking about loving what you do more than hoping it makes you rich.”







As the two groups gelled, talk turned to the idea of collaborating on a game. Black Forge came up with the storyline and an extensive backstory for the game's cast. Players control avatars of the coffee house's owners/operators, Ashley Corts and Nick Miller, who fight the otherworldly invaders and “the alien-assimilated elderly, bros, cowgirls, and country western singers.” The game also features Pittsburgh locales for stages and a remastered chiptune soundtrack by Greywalker.







“As we started talking about what should be in the game, we wanted to distil the best poignant, exciting parts of 16-bit beat-em-ups. You can play it casually for 30 minutes, put it down and come back months later because you're busy as hell and still enjoy it right out of the gate, or you can play for 2 hours because it is a full-featured story line. It's not a static stream puzzler. You'll see a lot of stuff that does come out doesn't have breadth or replayability, so we put a ton of Easter eggs and mini-game kind of stuff. We wanted to give it that arcade replayability that you can keep going and keep playing even though it is a repetitive beat-em-up.”







While a PC download is also available, “Coffee Crisis” is designed as a full retro experience from physical cartridge to packaging to game manual.







“We love the idea that we try to keep it physical in a digital world, so with all this Cloud storage and download codes, we want to focus on the in-box experience. It's the adult version of you're driving home from Toys ”R” Us, you're sitting in the backseat reading every word of the manual, and you can't wait to plug that cartridge in when you get home.'







“We're talking about the whole physical media thing, and Black Forge has a pretty high traffic for our niche based on the events they have, every week they have bands playing there, anime club meetings on Sunday, art exhibits for local artists, anything you can put into that building that has a trait of cultural element, that's supporting the community, Nick from Black Forge is constantly on it. It's like he runs an events promotion company inside of a coffee shop.”







Mega Cat recently set up a Genesis free play day at Black Forge, which was met with a substantial response from area retro enthusiasts who saw the event promoted on Facebook and Craigslist, leading to around 30 strangers learning about the existence of both companies.







“When we went into this, we figured, worst case scenario, we do a cool thing, and it's a really unique marketing initiative for Black Forge and us, a great way to support a local, community place and just front the development and hope that we can find the obscure, hidden collectors who see eye-to-eye with wanting to buy a new cartridge in 2016.”







In addition to “Coffee Crisis,” Mega Cat has many other games, across multiple retro formats, in various stages of development. Deighan sees numerous benefits to the multitasking approach for the team of dozens of international members.



“I think it's pretty common for the casual developer to choose one development that is completely immersive and long and slow, but we find that they can break up their attention span and get more work in totality if they multitask. If you just sit down a do the same task for 10 hours, you're absolutely going to reach burnout, but if you're flipping pages and picking up something different, you can learn other additional, useful tips for development, depending on how the game operates and how it works. It kind of keeps it fresh for anyone working on the art or the development side.







“Everyone wants to collaborate on each other's ideas, but everyone also has their own ideas that they want to execute on. It also helps to keep it flat for everyone to feel that they have an equal share of votes for when we decide what to work on next. 'Well, I love this game, what if we do a game like this for that system?'”







Another aspect that makes Mega Cat stand out is the company's pledge to be “effective, innovative, and inclusive” which includes not only making more diverse characters, challenging stereotypes, not having women as a reward and making the gameplay more inclusive by “increasing accessibility options in games to better include people who may be mobility, visual, hearing, or cognitively-impaired.”







“We have a very diverse team; we have every gender identification, every age group—one of the guys who works for us is in his early-60s, one of the guys just turned 17, so it's not like we have a typical team. It also serves to exemplify what the gaming community can encompass; it's this huge spectrum of people of types and sizes and whatnot.







“I think a huge theme across the gaming community is we're evolving as a culture, there's this never-ending insurgence of people for equal rights and equal representation, and gaming itself does have such an enormous impact from youth to adults. It's a mainstream medium itself, so it should be trending along with other steps forward. Since we have this opportunity, to set a small example for our small community, it seems that we should lead by execution.”







Those interested in learning more about the “Coffee Crisis” Kickstarter can check it out here:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacatstudios/coffee-crisis-for-the-sega-genesis-metal-aliens-an