Trivia / ULTRAKILL

• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • Hakita has never actually read The Inferno (he mentioned not being able to find a translation he was happy with) and only made the room with three Cerbs in Gluttony because he thought it would be a cool encounter, not because he knew that Cerberus is in Gluttony in the original poem. The only reason the initial Cerberus boss fight has only two Cerberi is because three was too difficult that early in the game.
  • Blood as a fuel source, while not being nearly enough to power a robot in the same way as V1, is indeed a possibility.
• He Also Did:
  • Stephan Weyte, who voices Minos Prime, is also known as the voice of Caleb from Blood and the Final Boss in DUSK.
  • Lenval Brown, the voice actor for Sisyphus Prime, was the narrator and the skills in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut.
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • The week of Act II's scheduled release, Hakita felt like writing Purple Prose; this became the secret book in 7-4. The Act II dev commentary stream has him cite Cruelty Squad's ending prose as an inspiration, specifically referencing how Cruelty Squad developer Ville Kaillo juxtaposes beautiful and complex words with ugly and blunt words.
  • During one of the developer livestreams Hakita references John Romero's famous design ethos for Doom: if you can see it, you can go there. This reflects in the game via the lack of invisible walls and, in the case that something like that does block access to a distant landmark, said landmark will be the setting for a later level so it's not truly gated off.
• Meme Role Reprise: Gianni Matragrano, voice of the game's main rival Gabriel, does a lot of humorous content in-character separate from the game, including "crashing" a friend's stream to berate them in front of their audience or streaming ULTRAKILL as Gabriel.
• Permanent Placeholder:
  • The scream sound effect that lesser and greater husks make when falling was originally a temporary placeholder. However, Hakita found the scream amusing and it was left in.
  • Using "The Fire Is Gone" song in the main menu was originally supposed to be temporary.
• Promoted Fanboy: Francis Xie was originally an ULTRAKILL fanartist before becoming a part of not just the game's devteam, but New Blood in general. He was responsible for the designs of Leviathan, the Ferryman, the pre-corpse designs of Sisyphus and Minos, the church organ in 6-2, the Beamcutter (eventually cut for reasons elaborated below in What Could Have Been), and the textures in 5-3 and the Heresy layer.
• Prop Recycling: Model of the Cerberus is taken straight from Untraceable, a scrapped game of Hakita.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions:
  • Lead dev Hakita's stance on the topic of ULTRAKILL pornography is summed up in two words: '"Don't care".
  • Dave Oshry, head of ULTRAKILL publisher New Blood Interactive, was initially confused about the Rule 34 of the game's robot protagonist... but then he and developer Hakita leaned into it, the latter now retweeting suggestive (though tame) fanart on the game's official account. They eventually created an SFM model for V1, seemingly for the purpose so that the character can be used in porn, and later started selling body-pillow covers of V1 (though the latter was mostly as a joke). WARNING: The link is a spoiler for 2-S.
• Science Imitates Art: One species of bacteriophage has been given the name "MinosPhrime" ("ph" for "phage" is a convention in naming phages), after the Super Boss of the first act. Initially requested name was "ULTRAKILL" outright, and then "Corpse of King Minos (get it)", but both requests were denied. This phage has an outstanding resistance to ethanol (surviving an extended bath in 90% working concentration of ethanol), which is deadly to the vast majority of phages.
• Shrug of God: Hakita has stated that he's not interested in telling a story about very fine details that don't hold relevance to the story's most important points. Some things, such as how V1's regeneration works, or how tall all the characters are, he prefers to leave up to the interpretation of the viewer.
• Throw It In!:
  • The ability to parry your own shotgun blasts was originally a glitch. It was kept in the final game because Hakita thought it was fun.
  • In a development stream, Hakita revealed that the growl Sisyphus Prime makes whenever he's parried is actually the sound of Lenval Brown clearing his throat. They had forgotten to record the intended parry responses, but Hakita opted to use the chosen voice clip instead, as he felt it fits the character so well.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A weapon called the Beamcutter was once planned, functioning comparably to Quake's lightning gun and featuring a constant hitscan damage stream that required V1 to constantly move to maintain high damage output. It was cut due to design issues and to reduce redundancy and bloat in the game's wide variety of weapons, likely referring to how it shares a similar "constant firing" niche as the Nailgun, itself needing several redesigns due to ULTRAKILL's combat system making sustained fire weapons difficult to work with. The Credits Museum also shows that one of its modes would summon a beam drone as its alt fire.
  • There was going to be a mechanic that would fill a meter as you rack up kills that once full would ether let you activate a temporary buffed state ala Devil Trigger or let you fire a shot from the Black Hole Gun superweapon, which fired a black hole that draws in enemies before compressing and killing them. Both were scrapped when the designers were having trouble finding difficulty balance with it due to hoarding and having to design on whatever the player can use them or not. The Black Hole Gun would be replaced with the much weaker but more consistent Rail Gun, while the concept of a temporary buff would be filled with the Dual Welding powerup.
  • The Revolver's alt modes were completely different: the green mode was called Ricochet and its shots ricocheted off walls in exchange for being weaker, but it was too hard to use during gameplay, so it was replaced with the Marksman and later reworked into the red Sharpshooter mode; meanwhile, the original red mode allowed the player to dual wield revolvers, which was also scrapped and later revisited with the Dual Wield powerup.
  • As mentioned during a developer livestream, one of the designs for the suicide-victims-turned-people-trees in 7-3 originally had a comically sized ass. Hakita spotted this and vetoed it because "[he knows] how fucking horny these dumbass people are, [he doesn't] want people to be lusting up after a suicide tree". The size of that tree's ass was reduced for the final release.

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