A young Hungarian studio lets an unusual cop duo explore the depths of their souls.

For a very long time, gamers immediately thought of Sam & Max when they heard “animal cop duo”. Now, with with Sonny and Marty, a fresh ­animal cop duo has been playing its way into the hearts of many adventure fans. With ­Chicken Police: Paint it RED, Hungarian developer The Wild Gentlemen tells a wild tale of love, death, chickens, and redemption! Chicken Police is a buddy-cop noir adventure with a carefully crafted world, a gritty story, and absurd humor. The game mixes classic adventure games with visual novel-style ­storytelling, presented in a beak-droppingly unique art style. The Hungarian studio has received many high ratings and awards for its debut game.

Publisher HandyGames released Chicken Police for PC, PS4 and Switch first digitally in November 2020, then physically a few months later. Meanwhile, the animal adventure is also available for iOS and Android.

Making Games spoke with Creative ­Director and Writer Bánk Varga about the development of Chicken Police – and what’s next for The Wild Gentlemen!

Making Games: Why chickens?
Bánk Varga: The whole idea of Chicken ­Police came from a decade-old youtube video, where two chickens break up a fight ­between some rabbits in someone’s backyard. The video was funny, yes, but what grabbed my attention was the title: ­“Chicken Police”. Something clicked with me and with this title. Because I’m a huge film-noir fan, I immediately thought about a grumpy, half-alcoholic rooster with a trench-coat and whisky ­flavored inner monologues about a dark, rainy city full of predators. It was just an inspired moment, and then I started ­immediately to build the world and the ­characters. The first two were Sonny ­Featherland and Marty MacChicken, of course, our main heroes.

The reviews for Chicken Police are great. Did you expect that?
To be totally honest, we expected somewhat good reviews because many who played our demo absolutely loved the game. We had our doubts, of course, but we hoped that the full game would get the same results or even better ones. We worked on this game for three years, and I had the idea and the world from 2011. So it was a big journey. But in the end, the reception was overwhelming, especially in the launch week! The reviews were 8/10, 9/10, 10/10, our Metacritic is over 80%, and we got some really great and prestigious coverage too. Maybe we couldn’t reach every big magazine we wanted to, but we reached many-many smaller ones instead, and our steam reviews were (and are) tear-jerkingly great even today. So overall, yes, we hoped for good reviews, but we never dreamed of this avalanche of love we got.

Was it clear from the beginning that your first project would be an adventure game? What other genres were on the shortlist?
The Wild Gentlemen is a rare and strange creature… our team consists of some newby developers (like myself) and some veterans who have more than 20 years of experience. Also, our team consists of fans of various genres, from arcade shooters, racing games, beat em ups to JRPG’s, but I can literally list every genre ever created. So we are not ­adventure game developers, but we got this strong vision for Chicken Police (a detective adventure), and we know that we have to make it a reality. Also, maybe the adventure genre was the most significant “common set” we got from all the genres we love. I don’t want to be too spoilery about our ­future, but we have ideas for many other genres than adventure games or visual novels, but we don’t say that we will drop the adventure genre because we passionately love the formula we made for Chicken Police.

Which games (or other media) inspired you most to make Chicken Police?
As for the story, we obviously looked for ­inspirations in the classic noir movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s, like The Big Sleep, Gilda, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, Murder My Sweet, etc. Also, I’m a huge fan of the works of Raymond ­Chandler, so he and his hero, Philip ­Marlowe were the main source of inspiration for the whole noir/­detective aspect.
As for the animal side, we have to ­mention Orwell’s Animal Farm and the ­movie Porco Rosso by Hayao Miyazaki.
From the gamer’s perspective, the main inspiration was Grim Fandango for its ­memorable characters, music, and ­atmosphere and Snatcher/Policenauts for its core gameplay flow and overall feel.
We were neck-deep in development when BoJack Horseman came, but that was also a late inspiration or more like a ­confirmation for us. I always thought of BoJack as a spiritual brother of Chicken Police.

You have received a lot of praise for the story and dialogue. How did you go about writing it? What focus did you want to put on the story? What emotions do you want to evoke in the player?
For me, the focus was always to make the characters real. Not just funny, or relatable or loveable, but real and alive, like you and me. Our characters are heavily frustrated, broken, scarred, and flawed people with heavy burdens from their past and even bigger questions about their future. Our heroes are not heroic; in fact, they ­behave in a particularly contemptuous way in some places, but that was essential for me to write them honestly and realistically. The main focal-point for the story was the strange relationship between our heroes and the echoes of their shared past. That’s the driving force for everything that ­happens in the story, even if the crime itself, we need to ­uncover, is not related to that.
The other important thing was to make the world also real and believable too. I wrote it as I write a novel, creating hundreds of years of history, religion, political and ­cultural ­systems. This was the backbone of the whole game, the entire story, and the backbone of our dialogues too. We just needed to carefully place some info about the world here and there – like mentioning a historical event, a pop-cultural figure, a social concept, or a shared memory – to make it more alive and more believable.
I think these factors made our dialogues and our overall story so engaging and memorable.

Part 2 coming soon!

Bánk Varga
Creative Director & Writer

A published writer, graphic novel creator, and videogame designer. Bánk wrote stories in various genres and tried out multiple media before he met Péter and Tamás, the co-­creators of The Wild Gentlemen, and formed the studio to make Chicken Police. Bánk’s childhood dream was to be a videogame creator/writer, so the release of Chicken Police – and its good reception – is a dream come true for him.