What inspired MediEvil?

Chris Sorrell, MediEvil's creator and producer, told the story himself in PlayStation.Blog's Behind the Classics series in 2012. The first design proposal, under the working title Dead Man Dan, "described a game that was a fusion of Capcom's Ghouls 'n Ghosts with the art style of Tim Burton, especially the look and feel of The Nightmare Before Christmas," two things he was, in his words, a huge fan of in the mid 1990s. The Burton comparison that follows the game everywhere is not a reviewer's guess. It is the brief.

Lead artist Jason Wilson shared the gothic bent and defined the look with Sorrell. In a 1998 interview Sorrell widened the film shelf slightly: "the kooky-spooky feel of films like The Addams Family." What the sources do not support is the longer list of horror influences often pasted onto the game by fans; the stated record is Capcom's arcade gauntlet, Burton's stop-motion world, and that Addams Family tone, comedy first, cobwebs second.

The hero came from the script side. Script doctor Martin Pond contributed Dan's core: a pompous failure in life whose resurrection is his one shot at redemption. Wilson iterated the design from bulky knights with small heads to little knights with huge cartoony heads before settling on what he called "the dorky fun look," and Sorrell named the result "an undead Dirk the Daring": a fraud in rusty armor, built to be laughed at and then, slowly, rooted for.