Alec Robbins spent weeks thinking about anuses. It was fall 2022, and Robbins, a cartoonist and game designer by trade, had been given a curious task: design an egg character for a video game to be played on Netflix’s sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave. And there was one part of the character that had to be just right for the gag to land. In the bit, show creator Tim Robinson was going to be playing an office worker goofing around on a (fake) vintage Mac game where the goal was to feed eggs to a bigger egg. Land enough eggs in his mouth and the anthropomorphized egg would reward the triumphant player with a peep show. Thus, Robbins’ butthole had to look like a real prize.
For anyone watching ITYSL this season, it’s clear Robbins’ design scored. After the show’s new season debuted on May 30, “Eggman Game” quickly became one of fans’ favorite goofs, with some even creating their very own browser-based version. It may not top “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” as ITYSL’s best meme, but it’s close.
It’s unusual for a TV show to bring in someone to craft a working video game for a scene, rather than just ask an animator to make a mockup that gets added in postproduction. But Robinson and show cocreator Zach Kanin wanted something that worked, something performers in the sketch could interact with. So they asked Robbins, who had been a production coordinator on the show’s first season, to make a playable version of the “Eggman Game” they’d written for the episode. “I think the intention was that we'd give Tim [Robinson] something real to interact with in the sketch rather than staring at a blank greenscreen,” Robbins says.
It took about two weeks to create the game, the mechanics of which were dictated in the script. As the game evolved, most of the discussion between the duo and game maker came down to how the egg itself should look. Robbins considers himself a cartoonist above all else, so drawing the character was more exciting for him than any other part of the process. He went through a few different versions—an egg that looked frightened, a humanoid version in a suit, “one that was horny and seemed to really enjoy being fed eggs.” The final version Robbins and Kanin landed on was “something more dead-eyed, more ominous” than what he’d previously pitched.
“And of course we had to figure out the butthole situation,” he adds.
As he tried to craft the ideal anus, Robbins debated several options: a cartoon X, a simple circle, a little dot. The final result was somewhere in between. Kanin sent him a concept sketch that “lit my brain on fire,” and that cemented the look. “It was really simple: just a circle with a smaller little crescent line inside, implying some complicated depth; I took that and ran with it,” Robbins says. “I think the final product really only amounts to four or five pixels of black, but those pixels go a long way.”
Once that was done, Robbins just had to make sure it worked. “Tim is playing in real time for the most part—I supervised the game itself on set and was manually cueing up some of the pop-up messages,” Robbins says. “It could run on its own entirely by Tim's hand, but sometimes he had to focus more on the performance.”
Even though Robinson and Kanin had laid out much of “Eggman Game” in the script, Robbins did have a few goals in mind: “Nothing is meant to work as intended, everything is supposed to feel confusing, and the experience is hostile,” Robbins says. He also wants to be clear about one thing: “The egg game is not porn.” Rather, “it's just a fun game to play in the office where you win a nude egg if you get far enough.” It’s allowed.
The gag lasts only a few seconds for viewers, but for Robbins, it’ll linger much longer. “It's a really unforgettable cartoon butthole,” he says.