Nintendo UK: Overcooked is quite unusual as a multiplayer game since it’s 100% co-operative. What prompted you to make a local co-op game rather than a competitive one?

Phil Duncan: When we worked at Frontier we’d get together with friends at lunchtime and we’d play any sort of local multiplayer games we could get our hands on. At the time, it felt like there just were very few local co-op games around.

Oli De-Vine: We went through a lot of iterations of making different kinds of local co-op games. We didn’t start from a position of trying to make a cooking game, it’s just that as we experimented, we found that cooking was just a really good basis for cooperation.

PD: It just seemed like a really good analogy for the kind of experience we wanted to replicate. You all have to work together, there’s a lot of communication required. Also, there’s a basic understanding of what you’re creating. Most people know how a burger is made, or they know how a pizza is made. So they come to the game with that level of understanding and that way, the game is more about how you work as a group rather than what is necessarily happening.