Who needs fancy graphics, voice acting, and hi-tech bells and whistles when you've got old school charm, two underdog heroes, and a boatload of irreverence? Not Zombie Cow Studios, who went from relative obscurity to cult favourite within a year with the release of two indie adventures. But who are these guys anyway? Series creator Dan Marshall took time out of his hectic lifestyle to talk to Adventure Gamers about the studio’s titles past and present (in more ways than one), from Ben There, Dan That! and Time, Gentlemen, Please! to the forthcoming episodic Ben-and-Dan debut, Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican.

Adventure Gamers: Let's start by asking who or what make up the Zombie Cow?

Dan Marshall: It’s technically just me, but I’m lucky to be joined in my ventures by a whole host of awesome people. That includes Ben [Ward] as we toss ideas back and forth, and now the awesome Lemmy and Binky, a couple of AAA devs-turned-indie, responsible for the tragically as-yet-unfinished The Forgotten Element.

One day hopefully we’ll be rich and powerful enough to finish that off, but at the moment the three of us are working on something a bit exciting together – not an adventure, but the same sort of comedy nonsense as Time Gentlemen, Please!

AG: You've produced two highly acclaimed adventures so far. Have Zombie Cow always been about producing adventure games?

Dan: Nope, the first game I wrote was a 2D cartoon deathmatch game which took up two full years of my life (from learning to code to the final F5). Ben There, Dan That! was then written as a silly little comedy freeware game designed to bring more attention and traffic towards Gibbage, and hopefully bring in a few more sales.

Ben There, Dan That! sat on my hard drive 95% finished for about a year, and after release turned out to do a lot better than Ben and I had ever really anticipated, and wound up bringing in just about enough donations to consider a small follow-up for the die-hard fans. Time Gentlemen, Please!’s development spiralled wildly out of control, and wound up eclipsing the original in so many ways that it justified a commercial release as a way of clawing back something from the countless man hours we’d somehow poured into it over the preceding nine months.

AG: For any readers who haven't played Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, what are those two games about?

Dan: They’re about a couple of geeks getting themselves into scrapes. They’ve been brought up on a diet of Full Throttle and Sam and Max, and have taken the adventurer’s lifestyle to heart – that means picking up anything that takes your fancy en route and be damned with the consequences.

Ben There, Dan That!'s a simple little puzzler – upon attempting to fix the TV aerial so they can watch Magnum P.I., our two adorable little geeks get abducted by aliens and wind up having to travel through various improbable dimensions looking for the way home.

It all ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so in Time Gentlemen, Please!, they travel back and forth in time in an attempt to undo the situation they find themselves in, and in doing so accidentally set up Hitler with an army of dinosaur Nazi clones and cause the Universe to become impossibly unstable with time rips opening left, right and centre. The usual stuff.

AG: Your first game was free and your second very cheap. But if you keep following this trend you'll be charging a million for your tenth game, by which time we'll be addicts... is that the plan?

Dan: I’m not exactly sure how pricing’s going to work yet – obviously the Dan and Ben games hit a certain niche and it’d be silly to be charging huge prices for little kooky games. That said, I’m running a business now like a grown-up, and it’d be really nice if it didn’t collapse out from under me. So yeah, million pound games from now on, I think.

AG: Your protagonists in the Ben and Dan games have the same names as you guys: how much of you is in them?

Dan: They’re based on us, I guess, but probably not as much as people assume. They look vaguely like us, and share certain traits, but that’s it. For the upcoming Episode(s), we’re going to be working on separating the two characters a little, defining who they are and the differences between them. For Ben There, Dan That! they were essentially interchangeable – it didn’t really matter who said a certain line, it would never have felt like “that’s not the sort of thing Ben would say”, you know? For Time Gentlemen, Please! we got away from that a little bit, and hopefully they’ll be a bit more unique with individual characteristics in future games. It’s an iterative process – they’re learning and changing with time, which is weird and exciting.

AG: Are any of your other characters based on real people?

Dan: Hitler is, he’s loosely based on this guy called ‘Hitler’.

AG: What do you think the best aspects of the games are?

Dan: I think they’re genuinely funny, which is a weird thing to sit back and say about your own work. There’s stuff in there that still makes me laugh even though I’ve seen it a thousand times. Most people seem to agree that they’re funny, despite the subjectivity of humour meaning we can never please everyone.

I’m also very proud of some of the puzzles in TGP – there’s some really deep, innovative, clever stuff in there, like the Alien Planet/ BBC Micro game mash up. It’s one of those puzzles that’s really meaty and satisfying to solve.