Adventure Time creator reveals how Super Smash Bros. inspired his new project

The Elephant, which reunites four Adventure Time veterans, premieres Dec. 19 on Adult Swim

Pendleton Ward is best known for creating Adventure Time, but after leaving the show in the early 2010s, he’s kept a relatively low profile while contributing to the occasional intriguing project. Now, Ward has reunited with three of his former Adventure Time collaborators (Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, and Patrick McHale) for a new animated project, The Elephant, which consists of three loosely connected shorts airing as a single, ad-free special on Adult Swim on Dec. 19. (It’ll be streaming on HBO Max the next day).

Ward’s contribution kicks off the experience, and without going into too much detail about exactly what happens in it, I’ll just say that there are a lot of video game references. The animation sometimes shifts styles to resemble a side-scrolling adventure, and at one point, we even watch as one character attempts to complete a particularly difficult 2D dungeon (while also driving a car during a high-speed chase).

When I ask Ward what inspired him to weave so many video game references into his piece of The Elephant, he responds simply, “Just for fun,” before offering a more concrete explanation.

“I don't play Super Smash Brothers, but other people that were involved do, and so that inspired the flashes when the characters are falling off the platformer,” Ward tells Polygon.

He adds that while he’s not a fan of fighting games in general, he does find plenty of joy in other genres — even if that comes from trying to break the game, rather than play it as intended.

“Anything with too much tension makes me feel too much tension, and then I stop playing it,” Ward says. “I need to relax when I'm playing. I'm a casual gamer. If I'm playing Skyrim, I'll enjoy spending an hour just trying to get up a mountain that you're not allowed to get up by riding the vertices on the side, just trying to wiggle up the vert until I can get to the top of the mountain and glitch out and fall through the mountain. That's a game for me. That's what I enjoy doing. Hurting other people in games is not my goal generally.”

When I ask what he’s currently playing, Ward falls back on a favorite of his, Noita, an indie roguelike platformer released in 2019. The game’s hook is that every pixel has its own unique physics and can be destroyed, exploded, or burned. This makes for a chaotic and challenging experience in which one false move can burn down the entire level.

“I go back to Noita a lot,” he says. “It's one of the very few games where when you die, inevitably, it rips a big laugh out of you because the events that led to the death are so extreme. The contrast is so intense that it always makes me go "Ah hahahaha!" It rips this laugh out of me.”

The game’s procedurally-generated levels and complex puzzles also give it a high level of replay value, which helps explain why Ward keeps going back to Noita, six years after its release.

“It goes really deep,” he says. “I wish I had Noita when I was a little kid because the depth to the secrets in it are infinite.”

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The Elephant airs Dec. 19 at 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Adult Swim, and will be streaming on HBO Max on Dec. 20.