Chris Charla doesn’t look like a guy under much pressure—but when your new game title is being touted as a potential “killer app” for the Sony PSP, you’ve got every right to be a little nervous. With launch games that didn’t exactly wow critics, the PSP’s sales haven’t reached Sony’s projections. But Death, Jr. is expected to help change that. With its stylized graphics and offbeat storyline, the platform/shooter has stood apart from the handheld’s other titles ever since it was announced. Now, with its August 16 release date edging closer, gamers are eagerly awaiting their chance to plug Death, Jr. into their PSPs. As senior producer of the game (and Executive Producer for Development at Foundation 9 Entertainment), Charla knows exactly what they’ll be playing. In this interview, he gives us a preview of Death (Jr., that is).

What’s the premise behind the game?

You’re an average, every day middle-school student—except your dad happens to be the Grim Reaper. Obviously, this causes some problems in your middle school, like the other kids aren’t that great of friends with DJ (Death, Jr.) because he looks like a little skeleton. But he does have this core group of freaky friends he hangs out with: Pandora, who’s a little Goth girl; Smith and Weston, who are twins conjoined at the head; Stigmartha, a girl whose hands bleed when she gets nervous; Dead Guppy, who’s a dead guppy; and the Seep, who’s kind of like an armless, legless fetus in a jar.

So on a field trip to the local Museum of Supernatural History, they sneak away from the main group, and Pandora finds this box that she really wants to open. DJ has a little bit of a crush on her, so he whips out his scythe, smashes open the box, and unleashes hell on Earth. So he realizes, as his friends are getting their souls ripped out of their bodies and sucked into the box, he should probably call his dad. Clearly, something is afoot with death, and he’s really screwed up—but he also knows that if he calls his dad, he might get grounded or go to military school. So he sees a sign that says “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass,” and there are two pistols behind it, so he smashes it with the scythe and away he goes. Basically, you have to get rid of all the demons that have been unleashed, rescue your friends’ souls, and confront Moloch, this necromancer who’s been trapped in the box.

What inspired this concept?

We were working on a tech demo, and we needed a character to put in it. We weren’t really planning to do a full game at the time, and we came up with a big list of different characters, like a female secret agent, a guy with an axe, all that kind of stuff. And one of the artists just slipped in this sketch of this little dead kid, and it just said, “Todd, the Son of Death.” And everybody who saw it said, “That’s just freakin’ hilarious. We’ve got to do something with it.” Especially because it was a tech demo, there’s not a lot of risk. And then when we started showing the tech demo around, the publisher and media interest was so high, we knew we had to keep going. So we fleshed out the world and did a comic book with Ted Naifeh, just self-funded, which we gave away at Comic-Con. It just kind of grew from there.

I think we knew from the very beginning that we wanted to have a shooter—the basic goal of the game was to have Mario with a gun, so you’d have this combination of platforming and shooting. You’ve got platforming with the scythe—you can use it for ledge grabs, wire slides, and stuff—but you’ve also got this huge arsenal of guns: twin pistols, electric gun, rocket launcher, and C4 hamsters, which are hamsters with a charge of C4 on their back that just squeak to an enemy and explode. We have a level set in a middle school—we wanted to figure out how we could do a shooter set in a middle school that wouldn’t upset anyone. But if you’re ever confronted with demons in your middle school, you should kill them.

Was there any caution over designing such a morbid game about Death in these socially conservative times?

Death is like the ultimate supernatural civil servant. It’s not his job to determine where you go after you die. He’s like the mailman: When you die, he shows up, he severs your soul from your body, and away you go. You can argue with him all you want, but at the end of the day he’s not a force for good and he’s not a force for evil, he’s just a force of nature. And the notion that his son is extremely cute, sort of naïve, and doesn’t 100 percent know what his dad does for a living is just funny. Especially when he’s holding a scythe that’s twice as tall as he is.

So who is Death, Jr.’s mother?

She’s a beautiful woman with blonde hair who’s wearing pearls and high heels while she’s vacuuming the living room, very much like June Cleaver. We’re doing a comic book for Death, Jr., too, that (artist) Ted Naifeh and (writer) Gary Whitta are doing, and mom gets explored a little more deeply there. And of course, she has to be the classic ‘50s housewife.