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Trey Parker Risked It All For The New South Park Video Game 'The Fractured But Whole'

This article is more than 6 years old.

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are known for tackling heroic workloads on the fly in order to get their show on the air every week. But in the production phase of the franchise's new video game, South Park: The Fractured But Whole (out Oct.17), the 47-year-old Parker couldn't resist performing an even more hardcore feat out of devotion to a vision.

"The recording process was daunting," says Frank Agnone, executive producer of the long-running Comedy Central animated television series and its affiliated video game projects. "Plus, about five weeks before we got to the backend of the work that needed to be done, Trey had his gallbladder removed--he was really sick. We lost him for about two-and-a-half weeks: that set us back considerably as well, but we managed to rebound. There was even one day Trey was in the hospital, he convinced his doctor to let him leave the hospital to come to the office to record some dialogue and then he could turn around and go back to the hospital."

Amid a wave of laughter from members of South Park Digital Studios and the game's developer and publisher, Ubisoft San Francisco, the show's art director and producer, Adrien Beard (who also voices Token Black), adds: "He's deathly walking out the door, I'm like, 'Dude, you should totally be in the hospital--what are you doing? You're gonna die!' He's like, (in a frail voice) 'I just want the game to be sweet.'"

Before Season 21 of the series began on Sept. 13, Parker and Stone (who are each big gamers) had created a fresh storyline for South Park: The Fractured But Whole that expanded on the Seasons 13 and 14 "Coon and Friends" saga where the boys and their classmates play superheroes by forming a watered-down Justice League in Eric Cartman/"The Coon's" basement.

It's a running joke around the office of South Park Digital Studios in Marina Del Ray, Calif. that the show has no idea what they'll churn out from week-to-week. So although fans playing "The Fractured But Whole" will quickly recognize a direct overlap between the game's inciting incident and that of the "Coon and Friends" storyline from October 11th's Season 21, Episode 4 entry "Franchise Prequel," its incorporation into the series wasn't premeditated by Parker and Stone.

"The Fractured But Whole" serves as the sequel to 2014's "South Park: The Stick of Truth," a positively received single-player role-playing (RPG) game also published by Ubisoft San Francisco that complimented the show's Season 17 "Black Friday" serial, which itself was a three-episode satirization of the award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones. 

To ensure the creation of a "sweet" game that implemented key lessons from the experience of making "The Stick of Truth," South Park creators Parker and Stone took a more active role in all phases of the new game's development in order to bolster the aspects of comedy and gameplay therein. Central to that objective was the penning of a massive script covering a multitude of interactive scenarios with roughly 30,000 lines of dialogue that was "the equivalent of about four to five feature films," according to Agnone.

"'The Stick of Truth' had been a hard development," said Ubisoft SF and Fractured But Whole Game Director Jason Schroeder. "I think they kind of came into it a bit brazen, like, 'Oh! We'll just make a video game and it'll be great!' And then it turned out to be a lot of work, and they were like, 'God, I don't know if I ever wanna do such a thing again.' But for the impulse to make another one, they said, and I'm paraphrasing, 'What if we did it right this time? And this time change the process and be more involved from Day One rather than just being involved towards the end.' They felt like they really only figured out how to make a video game right at the end of 'The Stick of Truth.' This time, [they still did] a lot of work, but I think they're more satisfied with the process when they're directly involved the whole time."

Like its predecessor from three-and-a-half years ago, "The Fractured But Whole" is also a single-player RPG "Interactive South Park experience" that aims to push the boundaries of gaming and comedy. This time, the intricately crude endeavor pointedly spoofs the superhero film franchises of today and even the conventions of video games themselves.

The "New Kid" is once again a "silent protagonist" the gamer controls to move freely through the shifting child and adult worlds of the town of South Park, although now he and the boys role-play superheroes. But conflict, missions and combat quickly ensue once "Coon and Friends" splinter into all-out civil war over disagreements about Cartman's plan for a film franchise based on the group.

With another odyssey of hard, lighthearted work behind them, South Park Digital Studios and Ubisoft SF feel like they've accomplished their mission with The Fractured But Whole to enhance the show's video game prowess via better gameplay, combat and storytelling. While the quality and nature of the comedy will assuredly remain about the same, the sheer volume of jokes and unique situations should translate into a more full-bodied and authentic South Park experience.

When cutting through all the hype, anticipation and expectations of doing good by the South Park brand, the task for Schroeder and his Ubisoft SF team ultimately became whittled down to pleasing an audience of two.

"Matt is one style of gamer that's like, 'Yeah, action-packed, push me through. I wanna see this,' says Schroeder. "Trey is the other style of gamer who's like, 'Give me the freedom to walk down that alley.'

'Well, what's down there?'

(In a whisper) 'Nothing... just give me the freedom to go down there and experience that.'

That's the tightrope that I tried to walk with my team. I said, 'How do we make a game that Matt Stone is gonna love and that Trey Parker is gonna love?"

South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be released worldwide on Tuesday, Oct. 17 for Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4 (PS4) and Xbox One.