The Merch is an interesting creature. On one hand, it makes you go “awwwww!”, and on the other he rips your torso. Or so goes the legend. How exactly did this dichotic creature make its way into the wacky world of Eets?

In the summer of 2005, Klei Entertainment was getting ready to launch the Eets demo, and I wanted to see if the good folks at Penny-Arcade would be interested in taking a look. Lucky for me, I emailed the wrong Mike, and got a hold of Mike Fehlauer, their media manager (the other Mike, their famed artist, happens to get about a googol of emails a day). He passed the message on, and a few weeks later I was sitting in a shared conference room with him and Tycho, demoing our baby.

Tycho was pretty enthusiastic about Eets’ unique gameplay and sharp visuals, and not only did he post about us, but suggested that The Merch could fit quite well in this world, what with Eets being a whore to the consumer and all that. Okay, that’s not what he said exactly, but we did start chatting about The Merch making a star cameo in our game. So what would The Merch do? Spawn Merch Merch every few seconds? Become a mini-game where the user controls Eets to grab them before all the kids suffer a horrendous fate?

Merch Merchandise. Get them before your neighbour does! Or else.

We tried a bunch of this stuff, including having a vending machine spawn merchandise, which looked hilarious, but played poorly. We had The Merch react to physics, so you could essentially knock it off a platform to get rid of him, but that became too easy. Plus, having The Merch bounce on its head looked rather odd Making a whole mini-game out of it ended up being too time intensive for the limited development time we had left.

In the final iteration, we seemlessly integrated The Merch into the game, and placed him along side Eets‘ arch-nemesis, The Marshomech. Our final design had The Merch start sickly, with Merch Merchandise scattered across the level. Eets must buy the merchandise before The Merch becomes The Fleshreaper, ready to rip even The Marshomech to shreds!

But an Eets item is not complete without emotion at play. We added some depth by having the merchandise make Eets happy, as well as satisfy The Merch’s hunger. Strip away the profanity, add some great animations and effects, and BAM! you’ve got your star cameo that you see today!

The Merch	The Fleshreaper

These changes made The Merch both an obstacle and a helper. In one level, you must avoid The Merch at all costs! In another, you can use him to rid you of The Marshomech, and use the Merch Merch to make Eets happy.

Let me make a side note here: Penny-Arcade was extremely gracious to us. They’ve linked to us a couple times before (essentially “wanging” our web stats because of their phenomenal readership numbers), allowed us to leverage their IP essentially for free, and even bought me lunch Thank you very much, and let’s go for another beer on my next visit to Seattle!

Tycho links us. Note that our webstats were not particularly poor, just that his readership is spectacular

So, that’s the story of how Eets became the first game to officially feature a Penny-Arcade character. Have you seen The Merch in action? I posted a spoiler for one of the levels over the weekend, showing the official solution to one of our levels that feature him. Go ahead and give it a whirl! There are over one hundred official levels to Eets, and over 50 downloadable ones and growing, so one won’t hurt

If you haven’t already, you can try Eets for free. Now go play Eets! Or who knows what The Merch may do…