Cuphead is a tough little locally made game that just keeps on climbing ever higher, and fans are in for a treat at this weekend’s Kensington Market Jazz Festival.

The first live performance of the videogame’s big band soundtrack will be at El Gordo on Saturday night, with much of the development team in attendance. Featuring almost 20 musicians, soundtrack composer Kristofer Maddigan says it will be a fun celebration of the game’s successes so far. Those include celebrating over 3 million in sales, winning multiple awards and even getting a Twitter shout-out from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The soundtrack was nominated for the Juno for Instrumental Album of the Year.

“It’s very exciting. None of us at any point expected this amount of success or recognition. We’re all very humbled by people’s reactions,” said Maddigan in an interview earlier this week. It’s especially impressive considering how he got the gig: “They asked me if I was interested in being involved, and really, I think it was because I was the only musician they knew.”

Maddigan is a lifelong friend of the game’s creators, Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. Much of the people who worked on the game at Studio MDHR are friends and family.

“Poor Kris, I mean, I think when we started we said we just needed a little bit of music, and by the end, it was years of work and over three hours of amazing songs,” said Maja Moldenhauer, artist and producer on the game.

Cuphead earned instant buzz when it was first announced, as the game looks like a 1930s cartoon. Notoriety followed with its exceedingly difficult gameplay. It ended up being delayed for years as the team wanted to deliver on the hope and hype. Suffice to say, when it launched last September, it surpassed expectations, thanks in part to the attention to detail in all the game’s aspects, including its music.





Maddigan, a freelance percussionist whose main gig is with the National Ballet of Canada orchestra, said he really had to learn and listen to big band music when he first agreed to help with the project.

“I didn’t want it to sound like a 2000-teens composer writing 1930s-style music for a 1980s-style videogame. I wanted it to be, ‘what if the great masters of that era — Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway — what if that golden age of videogames had been right beside the age of big band? And what if they were writing for a completely different medium? How would that sound?’” he says. “That’s what I was trying to achieve.”

He credits John Herberman, a local composer and musician who became involved with the entire process, as really helping him understand the genre and create the music. Herberman will be conducting the “Cuphead Orchestra” at Saturday’s performance, while Maddigan says he’ll be MCing, playing some percussion and, hopefully, enjoying himself.

He says he initially scrapped a bunch of early tunes, which had a vintage sound but didn’t really fit the game.

“It had to be of that era, but it’s got to have that quirkiness that video game music has, but it also has to stand on its own,” says Maddigan. “And it had to live up to the visuals.”

Just as the scope of the game grew, so did the music. Initially, the plan was to record it all in MIDI and then overlay a live rhythm section, but as it got bigger, it evolved into the live recording that included more than 42 musicians. Maddigan says that when he was working on it, he was writing numbered tunes, and eventually got up to 150, which were whittled down to the 56 tracks that make up the soundtrack.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Studio MDHR remains busy, as it prepares to launch a port of the game for the Mac, and is planning a downloadable update to the game, which includes a new playable character.

Saturday’s night performance, held almost a year after the game’s release, will be a reunion of sorts for some of the far flung members of Studio MDHR, and gives one of the most accomplished aspects of Cuphead its due.

“We all think this is going to be really great, just because it give a chance for people to really enjoy Kris’s amazing music,” said Moldenhauer. “There was a lot of excitement about the game’s art, so some of the other aspects might have been overshadowed, so it’s really nice for it to get celebrated.”