This dark and dingy cell is how we have felt recently here at the office. Lots of late nights spent looking out the windows and watching the outside, trapped in a cage of our own emotions. (Okay, it’s not really like that at all. It’s been a lot of fun working on this thing.) In BattleBlock Theater, you and your friend will be playing as prisoners in a theater run by technologically evil cats. You’re not always in this prison cell though, as the majority of your time is spent performing to save your life, your friends life, and possibly the entire world.

Tears of joy and sadness

Although we won’t have a release date this year, or more specifically before the upcoming Mayan Apocalypse, we are excited to be hitting the home stretch with development of this game. It is indeed very exciting to us and hopefully to you too, but there’s still a lot of things to accomplish before our little baby can be released into the world. As you might already know, or for those who don’t know, there’s many rounds of testing, tweaking and submissions to different departments for review that we have to accomplish before we feel confident with releasing the game.

One small aspect of the submission process is obtaining game ratings, which are always strange and fun to do. You fill out a bunch of paperwork describing the various ways your game has violence, blood, humor, and lots of lots of clowns. After this you are assigned a rating by random acronyms from other countries.

Here’s our current list of acronyms ratings for BattleBlock Theater:

ESRB TEEN – Blood and Violence
DJCTQ 10 + V
CERO B 12+
CSRR 15+ Violence
USK 12+
FPB PG + V

Hm!  That list looks pretty violent!  Trust me – being eaten alive sounds a lot worse on paper.  I mean if you’re just watching someone being eaten alive it’s actually pretty funny.

Wait, that sounds bad, too.  Well, I’m sure you know what we mean.