'It's just such a depressing thing': Mythic Quest's creative team on the challenge of making a comedy amidst widespread gaming industry layoffs

"Mythic Quest lost a lot of good people… when we fired them," says David Bricklesbee (played by David Hornsby) in the first episode of Mythic Quest Season 4.

The workplace comedy about a dysfunctional game development studio doesn't waste any time referencing the biggest game industry trend of the past two years: mass layoffs. Bricklesbee, the studio's executive producer, addresses the challenges the fictional studio has faced since last season, like Covid. Specifically, the end of Covid, which brought the end of sky-high profits and thus mass layoffs.

While Season 4 doesn't focus heavily on the layoff situation (which continued this week, somewhat ironically, with Ubisoft, who produces Mythic Quest, shuttering another studio and laying off nearly 200 employees), the topic does pop up from time to time throughout the season.

"This is not 2020. The Covid bubble has burst," David says in another episode when asked to hire more staff members.

"Dude, the videogame industry made 56 billion dollars last year," says Rachel Meyee (played by Ashly Burch).

"Yeah, down from 60 billion. We're down four billion dollars. Do we know if another global pandemic is coming?" David says. "I mean, we hope. I mean, not for the death and all that stuff, that's terrible. But we made so much money."

During a Mythic Quest press junket conducted over Zoom, I spoke to several of the show's creators and writers: Rob Mc Elhenney, co-creator, executive producer, and actor who plays Mythic Quest's founder Ian Grimm (and co-creator of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia); Megan Ganz, co-creator, executive producer, and writer; and Ashly Burch, writer, co-producer, and actor. I asked them about the challenge of threading the needle when it comes to making jokes about such a serious topic.

"This is exactly the kind of thing we talk about on [It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia] every year," Rob McElheney said. "We've got 20 years of experience of always walking that line. Especially if you're making satire, it actually becomes a little bit easier, because you're recognizing that these are not real people that you're talking about. On Sunny, it's essentially a live action cartoon about sociopaths. But in Mythic Quest, it's real people in a real industry."

"We talked about a lot of different things that were going on in the industry this season," said Ashly Burch. "There's the [Season 4] episode about AI that isn't exactly related, but talks a lot about industry layoffs. It's kind of difficult, it's hard to make it funny."

"It's a hard thing for us to look at, especially because a lot of our central beloved characters are management, so they're part of the people that do the laying off, as opposed to a lot of the people that get laid off," said Megan Ganz.

"It was a little bit hard, but we try to find comedic slants on it," Ganz said. "Like, our [QA] testers are now two old white guys [played by Sunny alums Andrew Friedman and Michael Naughton] because we figured that was a funny way to comment on… The only types of jobs that they're going to be able to get now are these low level jobs," said Ganz. "But it is a difficult topic."

"It is something I think about a lot, especially with the amount of layoffs that happened last year and how many companies were affected," Burch said. "And if we get a Season 5, maybe we can find a funny angle into it. But it's just such a depressing thing that's happening in the industry."

"If you're making a comedy, as we all know, there is a big difference between making something the subject of a joke or the butt of a joke, and that is something we are always asking ourselves. Well, wait, what's the joke? Is the joke about the industry and the hypocrisy within the industry?" McElhenney said.

"Is it punching down? Or is it punching up? Those are always the questions that we're always asking ourselves, and we like to believe that we get it right 100% of the time, but we don't," he said. "We sometimes swing and miss, and sometimes we swing and the fist lands right back squarely on our nose. We do our best."