6 minute read
BERTRAM FIDDLE
from The Chap Issue 107
by thechap
Games
BERTRAM FIDDLE, GENTLEMAN EXPLORATOR
Darcy Sullivan discovers the weird world of Seb Burnett and his most chappish video game character www.bertramfiddle.com
Ilong to be an adventurer, but I don’t like doing anything adventurous.” A lot of us can relate to that. But cartoonist and accidental game designer Seb Burnett has turned his thwarted fantasies into comedy gold. Well, not actual gold. But it is very funny. That something is Bertram Fiddle, Victorian explorator, who has starred in the two most Chap-friendly video games you’ll ever point and click your way through. Bertram wears a massive moustache beneath his equally massive schnozzola, which resembles a jumbo shrimp. He inhabits a cartoon London rife with tea and skullduggery, where he and his Cyclopean sidekick Gavin slowly and ineptly track down nogoodniks like Geoff the Murderer. And there are puns. So many puns. Bertram Fiddle combines Sherlock Holmes with the nudge-nudge-wink-wink humour of the Carry On films and the kind of quirky folk you’d encounter in an Edward Gorey book, all filtered through Burnett’s delightfully goofy art. It could not be more British, with bad guys like Lord
I shan't rest until I solve this mystery and uncover the secret identity of Geoff the Murderer, whomever he is!
Arthwipe and Lord Wretchedly cackling in glee (the best way to cackle), and cameos by Oscar Wilde, Mr. Hyde and Professor Elemental. Bertram himself represents the gentleman-amateur spirit of explorers such as Robert Scott, taken to the ultimate degree of folly.
Burnett created Bertram in the mid-2000s, while working on his animation degree at Bristol’s University of the West of England. “I’m from a town in Lincolnshire called Spalding, so I made a short film about a great Victorian explorer who ends up in this soggy little backwater called Slapding, where everything smells of fish and cabbages, and people are descended from frogs and things like that. It wasn’t very nice to the people who live in Lincolnshire.”
Part of the inspiration came from 1970s films based on novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. In At the Earth’s Core, Peter Cushing plays a pernickety inventor with beefy American Doug McClure as his tag-along muscle (McClure, incidentally, was also part of the inspiration for hasbeen actor Troy McClure in The Simpsons). “I liked the idea of a Victorian who finds himself in these strange situations and tries to deal with them in a gentlemanly manner,” says Burnett.
So in his two video games, what way-out locations does Bertram Fiddle find himself in? A tropical island that time forgot, perhaps? A mirror version of Earth on the opposite side of the moon? How about an undersea realm ruled by the survivors of Atlantis?
“He’s basically stuck in London,” Burnett concedes. “He could be going to more and more exotic and ridiculous locations, but for the sake of simplicity we kept him in Victorian England.”
Peter Cushing and Doug McClure in At The Earth’s Core
Playing one of the Bertram Fiddle games is like finding yourself inside a children’s cartoon, albeit one that’s peppered with enough rude double entendres to satisfy Viz’s Finbarr Saunders. “My daughter Hana was about six or seven when we developed the first game, and she was play-testing it every night,” Burnett recalls. “One day we were walking down the street and she said at the top of her voice, ‘My grandfather has a massive clock!’”
THE GAME’S A FOOT
Originally pitched for a BBC comedy animated series, Bertram Fiddle was rejected as being too old for kids but too gentle for teens. Burnett and the Rumpus animation studio he co-founded then secured funds to turn it into an interactive puzzle game. Just not sufficient funds. Still, they persevered, and within a year completed The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle, Episode 1: A Dreadly Business.
“I remember when we got featured on the Apple App Store,” says Burnett. “I thought, I can retire now.” It turns out he couldn’t.
“Monument Valley had come out a few months before, and had 145,000 downloads in the first week. We had less than 5,000. But there are reasons why. The people who had made Monument Valley were attuned to what the people who play games on Apple devices wanted, rather than some sort of weird-nosed Victorian cartoon.”
Still, The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle gained a cult following, particularly in Japan, where it won the “Best Narrative” award at the Tokyo Indie
Fest 2015. That achievement set the stage for A Bleacker Predicklement, the second Bertram Fiddle extravaganza.“Some people said the first game was a bit simple, so I thought, alright, I’ll show them – I’ll make the next one twice as big and twice as complicated,” Burnett explains. “Sure, we could have been more business-savvy, but where’s the fun unless you’re crying in the middle of the night because you don’t know what you’re doing?”
Of course, it wasn’t just Burnett creating the games. The entire staff of Bristol-based Rumpus Animation was involved, as were programmers, a musician and voice artists like Louis Jones, who plays several characters including Bertram himself. (Jones is also the voice of Timmy the Sheep from Aardman Animations, co-located in Bristol.)
“I gave him references like Peter Cushing in At The Earth’s Core, and an inactive Victorian explorer with a fussy streak,” says Burnett. “The voice has changed over the years, since the first video was made in 2006/2007 and the last game was made in 2015/2016. When we’re recording the dialogue, Louis will record a line and I might say something like, ‘You’ve got to sound more worried here.’ He’ll reply, ‘You know I’ve got no idea what’s going on?’”
BERTRAM ON ICE?
If you’re not a gamer, there are other ways to explore Seb Burnett’s bizarre Britannica. He has drawn and written two Kickstarter-funded books, 100 Days of Mystery and 100 Days of the Macabre, which teem with malevolent characters and dark humour. You can feel the spirit of The Addams Family in these “tales of befuddlement and dread”, mixed with the grubby England of Charles Dickens. You’ll meet the Little Toad Girl, the Professor of Mothery, Jam Zombies, the Magpie Man, the Black Rose Killer and The Flaming Monocle. Imagine if Edgar Allan Poe wrote for kids.
As for Bertram Fiddle and Gavin, where they will turn up next is, appropriately, a mystery. “I’d love to make a live-action Bertram on Ice with Benedict Cumberbatch,” Burnett says. “Maybe we’ll get Jason Statham to play Gavin.”
Until our heroes reappear, you can join Bertram Fiddle’s quests on your iPhone, Nintendo Switch and Steam. And you can find Seb Burnett where you can find all great cartoonists: hunched over a drawing table in the smallest room in the house, door closed, scribbling a whole world to life with a pencil and paper.
“I’m quite misanthropic,” he says. “I’m enjoying lockdown; I can play in my little room being miserable and grumpy about everything.” n
