If you had asked two years ago what Wide Right Interactive’s follow up to Freedom Finger might look like, the answer was almost assuredly not “party game dubbing over bad movie clips.” From the irreverent hand-drawn shoot-em-up featuring a middle-finger spaceship, the studio proceeded to then make a party game unlike any other, mashing up the likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with that familiar Jackbox party game formula for one of the most hilarious party experiences we’ve ever played. After some time with What The Dub"!, we felt the irresistible urge to sit down with the minds responsible to learn more about how the idea came to be, why it’s sooooo different from Freedom Finger, comparisons to Jackbox, and just how painful mining awful public domain movies, PSAs, and industrial films ended up being. Wide Right Interactive Creative Director Jim Dirschberger and Head Programmer Mark Zorn were kind enough to press pause on what I can only assume was a riveting ’50s Italian sci-fi banger and hop on a Zoom call to chat. After the prerequisite banter of shared experiences from the pandemic, it transitioned into talking about developing a party game while the world was locked down and social distancing.
“The core kind of started in 2019 when we were finishing up Freedom Finger,” Dirschberger said. In the final month before launching Freedom Finger on PC and Switch in late 2019, Dirschberger and Zorn found a shared appr...