And the Trogdor comes in the niiiiiiiiight!
By "Trogdor," we mean Trogdor the Burninator, the peasant-stomping dragon from web cartoon Homestar Runner. And by "night" we mean the fifth and final chapter of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, the episodic series of adventure games for PC and Wii.
Developer Telltale Games gave Wired.com these exclusive screenshots, which show Trogdor starring in the final Strong Bad game. Gaze upon them and witness Trogdor's stick-legged might, now in three glorious dimensions. Imagine all the peasants he will "burninate" with his 3-D flames.
"Whenever we mentioned that we were making a Strong Bad game, inevitably someone would start screaming Trogdor!!!!!!!
at the top of their lungs," said Mark Darin, the game's lead designer.
"Naturally, we wanted to harness this energy and excitement and unleash it on the world for the season finale."
Trogdor quickly became a Homestar* *fan favorite after he was introduced in one of the early Strong Bad e-mails. A fan asked Strong Bad to draw a dragon to show off his "skills of an artist," and Trogdor -- a dragon with a single beefy arm growing out of his back -- was born. The Flash cartoon that introduced the dragon included a ridiculous heavy metal song about Trogdor that became so inexplicably popular that it was included as a playable track in Guitar Hero II.
Trogdor's popularity is most evident, though, when one watches Trogday, which chronicles all the ways fans have proven their love for the awkward beast: Trogdor vanity plates, tattoos, cakes, costumes and Magna Doodle art for starters.
Fan service aside, Trogdor's starring role in the final episode of the Strong Bad game is significant because the ridiculous creature has been central to the Homestar team's videogame efforts.
The Trogdor web game, released in 2003 just a few months after Strong Bad's fortuitous dragon e-mail, is a surprisingly addictive and clever time-waster patterned after retro arcade games. It has you stomping on peasants and burninating thatched-roof cottages while avoiding getting "sworded" by knights.
The web game begat Peasant's Quest, one of the most complex games on the Homestar Runner site. It's a parody of classic point-and-click adventure games like King's Quest in which a peasant attempts to get revenge on Trogdor for burning his cottage.
In the recent downloadable Strong Bad games for PC and WiiWare, a Trogdor arcade cabinet appears in Strong Bad's basement -- but if you try to play it, it's always out of order. Will the arcade game finally be playable in the fifth episode? Or, as shown in the screenshot, will Trogdor simply burst forth from the cabinet's innards and hang out on the couch to watch TV? Telltale won't tell.
While there's no release date yet for the Trogdor series wrap-up, the penultimate episode, titled Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective, will launch Nov. 17. It, too, will be built around a fan-favorite theme from the Strong Bad e-mails -- Homestar fans have been waiting for this third installment in Strong Bad's buddy cop series of badly shot movies, and now they'll get to play it instead of just watching it.
Images courtesy Telltale Games
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