Weren’t a fan of Shadows of the Damned’s garrulous humor? Blame EA

I tend to think of Grasshopper Manufacture’s Shadows of the Damned as a prototypical Suda 51 game: a perverse, sexually frustrated, B-movie kill-fest that is nevertheless a lot of fun. Your protagonist’s gun is a talking skull named Boner.

But according to Suda, the game as he envisioned it wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. Instead, it was the overseers at Electronics Arts, who financed the game through their Partners program, that told him to change things. “That game went through about five different versions,” he told Edge. “For example, originally when Garcia took out his gun and looked through the laser sight, it was ringed with flowers. And then around the circle of flowers were little leaping bunnies.” That means no tumescent, public-restroom-stall-humored, Ay, caramba-ing sidekick.

But the cuteness baffled the Electronic Arts Partners board, who apparently wanted the game to appeal to more American teenage males, who don’t like bunnies. “Those meetings felt like court interrogations,” he said.

So we eventually wound up with an internal monologue of bad penis jokes—not that Suda is beyond that, of course. (Ahem: No More Heroes.) But it would have been great to experience his original vision.