Max Field of SBN 3 is a long-time independent internet creator, with hundreds of parody and comedy dub videos filling out his 80 thousand-follower strong YouTube channel. He also created the 2021 visual novel Class of 09 and the 2023 pseudo-sequel Class of 09: The Re-Up. Following the release of an anime short based on these games, he launched a Kickstarter to create a longer anime episode around this IP; which surpassed its initial goal by more than one hundred thousand dollars.
Which is pretty surprising, considering the series was floundering in obscurity for most of its existence.
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Clips from the Class of 09 games and anime went viral on platforms like TikTok in the back half of 2023 and made them overnight hits with anime fans and lovers of irreverent humor. The way the series perfectly captures the experience of being a young person in the 2000s while still critiquing that time period made it one of my favorite releases from last year. Between the aesthetics of anime characters in front of real-world backgrounds and the setting of a time period that I’m increasingly nostalgic for, it felt like this series was made for me, and I had to know more about its production.
To my surprise, the inception of these games had more to do with the fiscal realities of creating independent media than it did with the affordances of video games as a medium. Max also spoke about the universal experiences of being a teenager in the 2000s and how the game was influenced by comedy and the popular media at the time. To my shock and awe, he also confirmed that this game’s storylines felt so real because some version of these events actually happened to women he spoke to while writing the first game!
Even if you don’t have the same affinity for this budding franchise as I do, this interview offers terrific insight into the struggles tied to independent content creation and emerging trends in that industry. Class of 09 and The Re-Up are available on Steam.
The following interview has been edited for readability.
BWT: Hello! Who are you? What’s your formal title on Class of 09 and what do you do outside of that?
Max: My name is Max. I run a studio called SBN3. It used to be a YouTube channel, but now it’s a whole studio. For a little over 10 years or so I’ve worked on multimedia content from films, to cartoons, to cartoon dubs, to parodies, to albums, to mix tapes; all the stuff! I’ve tried to be good at every trade and most recently I’ve gotten into making video games.
That just happens to be the thing people know me for now, but I’m largely a filmmaker first.
BWT: Learning a bit more about your background, do you think it’s weird that you’re best known for something that’s a bit of a tangent from your main body of work?
Max: I’ve never really committed to one thing. A lot of principles of filmmaking go into making a visual novel. It’s not like people are running around and jumping like it’s Super Mario [laughs].
All the screenwriting skills apply one to one. All the audio and sound design I’ve learned apply one to one. And all of the voice direction I’ve done with actors over the past ten years, including the How to Be A Voice Actor series I did on YouTube, applies one to one. I’ve had a lot of things blow up, it’s just that Class of 09 is the first thing that’s blown up where I’ve seen the fruits of that labor come back to me.
Is it weird? I mean, I’m an entertainer. So long as people are entertained by something that I do, nothing’s weird to me. I’ve been an entertainer for ten years, and when you’ve been doing something for this long you learn how to compartmentalize this stuff and move on.
BWT: In that vein, what motivated you to create Class of 09? Why make a visual novel? Why make this visual novel specifically?
Max: It’s very much financially motivated…See, I’m about to look like a bad guy but wait for it to flip around! [laughs]
This is the thing with the independent arts. The indie arts community was entirely destroyed by streaming and YouTube. Nowadays everybody gets everything for free, or from a small subscription. I saw that video games are the only medium where people still expect to spend money for a piece of media.
I saw that and I thought, “how do I take my skill set and adept my talents into something that will make someone click ‘add to cart for $9.99?’” All of the same integrity, work ethic, humor; all of the same everything translated from what I was doing on YouTube with short films into a game. With this game being a tangible thing that people pay for, this allows my team and I to make more stuff down the line, the Kickstarted Class of 09 anime being the big one.
What’s funny is that we put out that Class of 09 anime short, it’s gotten 1.5 million views on YouTube, and we haven’t even made our money back on making it! It’s just not possible with YouTube’s ad revenue. We’re really just making the anime because people want to see it; it’s more of a promotional move than the smartest business move.
BWT: That totally makes sense with the state of the digital media industry. I first discovered Class of 09 from clips blowing up on my TikTok; not sure if that’s more from Re-Up or the anime short release, though.
Max: I can give you the Class of 09 timeline if you want?
BWT: Oh please!
Max: Okay, in 2019 I was mostly known as a funny guy making high quality stuff on YouTube, since cinematography is a passion for me. In December 2019, I start writing and talking to people about making the first Class of 09. The first Class of 09 demo releases on Itch.io in October 2020. It does really well, being one of the top 5 visual novels on the site for a little bit; but of course that doesn’t make any money since it was free.
In June 2021, the first Class of 09 comes out. Critically it does really well, and I spend the next six months or so wondering where we go from here. After the winter sale, it actually starts to sell pretty well and we make our money back on it. This was really inspiring because I had worked on other games previously, but my work didn’t make it into the final version or the games didn’t come out. Seeing what happens when I take power into my own hands and put my own money up, I decide to take another risk and make a second game.
Class of 09: The Re-Up drops June 2nd, 2023…on the same day as Street Fighter 6! [laughs] We thought that these two games wouldn’t even compete, but Street Fighter 6 was directly killing our sales. For the first two weeks I thought I was going to be homeless or something; our game was doing so badly. Even with a publisher on this release; we were kind of freaking out.
This brings us to your TikTok remark. I remember the date, on June 24th, 2023 a clip of the game — the mall cop scene — goes viral. As that happens, the game starts selling, and we start thinking that it’s actually going to do a little bit better than we thought it would. The game starts to have an audience of a few hundred or thousand people, but there’s still no media attention. Guys like you aren’t hitting me up; this seems like it’s going to be a flash in the pan.
In the background, during all of this, I had been working on writing the Class of 09 anime short. The plan had been to release it alongside Re-Up, kind of like the Team Fortress 2 promotional campaign. I was a little out of my element on producing the anime short — it was kind of hard to get workers — and it isn’t ready in time for release. We drop that anime short in October and it turns out that the delay didn’t matter since no one had heard of the game anyway! [laughs]
Overnight the short explodes and our momentum increases 10 or 20 fold! So then we decide to launch the Kickstarter in December, and that brings you up to date on the Class of 09 timeline.
BWT: That makes a lot of sense! We’ve circled around your writing process for this series for a while now. Could you speak to some of your inspirations for the game? Where did this game come from creatively?
Max: Out of my own psychotic curiosity, what influences did you pick up on while playing? I wonder how it comes off to other people.
BWT: I’m picking up on some South Park vibes.
Max: Well, I mean that’s any millennial, right? [laughs]
BWT: Right, right. Yeah, it’s like South Park but with a more informed social lens. Like, it’s really apparent that this game wasn’t made by people who are Gen X millionaires now. If that makes any sense?
Max: That’s true, South Park was by the Gen Xers.
Let’s start with my writing influences over all. I definitely see a lot of South Park influences in what I do. I see a lot of Family Guy influences in what I do. There’s also a lot of older stuff in there like Abbot and Costillo and Gracho Marx, who created all of the entandra based humor that we have today. There’s a little bit of Rodney Dangerfield, Dave Chapelle, and Whitest Kids You Know in there too.
My friends of course really influence my writing, and there’s definitely some “Weird Twitter” too. As for non-comedic influences, Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee had a big impact on me. Seinfeld is also a big influence in how I block out and structure a story. I learned to write better screenplays by watching Seinfeld over and over.
As for Class of 09, my main influence comes from growing up in the DC Beltway. It’s a lot of Beltway culture that people sometimes mistake for LA Valley culture, but what happens in areas that don’t have a super strong cultural identity is that cadences and slang come from TV, and most of that is made in Southern California.
BWT: Right.
Max: So, that’s where a lot of the lexicon of the game comes from.
As for Nicole and the other girls in the game, they just come from talking to girls and the wild stuff they tell you. Like, I joined a girl’s Tik Tok live awhile ago and she just casually mentioned how she OD one time on hydroxyzine and had to spend a month in a mental hospital. People will tell you anything if you ask! It’s amazing [laughs].
It’s just all the stories that you hear about or see, some silly and some traumatizing. All of these different things get worked into a Class of 09 route. Obviously I change names and details around a bit to avoid a lawsuit. [laughs] That’s why we say in the About Me section that “Class of 09 is based on real events, encounters, and personalities.”
BWT: I mean, I’ve gotta ask then; since this is a recurring theme in the game, were there any kid touchers at your high school?
Max: Oh, tons!
BWT: Ugh! Okay…
Max: I mean every girl you talk to, it’s 50/50 if their gym teacher was a creep. That’s what I saw growing up in public school. We’d hear about a teacher doing some stuff like looking down a girl’s shirt while she’s doing push ups — that line actually made it into the game I think — and then he’d get suspended for two weeks and then come back. You think that’s kind of weird, but then you talk to someone who graduated after you and find out that he got suspended for doing the same thing after you left!
It’s just a lot of teachers that will flirt with girl students. A lot of it is stuff you don’t realize is weird when you’re a kid, but as an adult you realize how messed up it is that a teacher kept going back to the same girl student and giving her pet names and stuff. After a while you talk about it with friends and realize how common it all is.
BWT: Yeah. It’s kind of like our parents’ generation and Catholic priests. Everyone knew that stuff was going on and just didn’t talk about it. Also I asked because one of my teachers got popped for this two years after I graduated. I think he went to see an underaged prostitute or something.
Max: Wow, sounds like a Class of 09 storyline. [laughs]
BWT: Right!? [laughs] On that note, though, can you talk about some of the thematic changes between Class of 09 and The Re-Up? The first is more sympathetic to Nicole and how much it sucks for her to just exist as a young woman in the 2000s, but the second has her interact with equally or more marginalized characters and is more critical of her. Am I fair in that evaluation? Was that an intentional change?
Max: The philosophies were different going into each game.
In Class of 09 we wanted to make a pretty girl simulator and show how being nice always ends badly for women. I was also taking cues from Postal 2’s mission where you can choose to wait for or steal milk, and wanted players to be able to explore these situations free of consequence. I also wanted to capture stories I heard about guys hitting on girls nonstop and in just the lamest ways.
We wanted to show players the pretty girl experience, and have them experience both the benefits and pitfalls of that. That was the core idea for the first Class of 09; I wanted to punish players for being nice. Some might call that good game design, but a lot of people seemed to find that boring since not a lot of people played it.
For Re-Up, I drew upon my experience dubbing cartoons and creating parodies, and made a series of misadventures in my own Class of 09 universe. This made it a longer game, and also fleshed out other characters like Emily, Morgan, and Ari; who went from having six lines to 220 lines in the second game. I just wanted to flesh out these characters and speak to themes like abusive relationships, cheating, and homelessness.
BWT: That makes a lot of sense; and look at you go! Creating your own universe to explore these ideas in. That’s really cool!
Max: Yeah [laughs] thank you.
BWT: This approach has obviously worked really well. Your Kickstarter just wrapped and surpassed its goal by more than $100,000. How do you feel about that?
Max: [laughs] I guess it feels good, but now I have to spend all of that! On the one hand, it’s cool we get to do it, but now we have a lot of work to do! [laughs]
I’ve learned working in this business for over a decade that you can never get comfortable and you can never be happy. I could have been happy with the game popping off in June, but a lot of entertainers are motivated to keep going higher and higher and higher.
I’m working on Class of 09 stuff right now that nobody can fathom or predict, in mediums that no one will see coming! I’m always going at it. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but pulling off a Kickstarter and then making the project happen are both work. Once the anime is out, then I’ll be happy. That’s when the happiness kicks in for me.
It’s not real until I’m done.
BWT: The hustle never stops!
Max: Absolutely.
BWT: You touched upon this a little bit earlier, but does the game take place in the Beltway?
Max: Oh yeah. All the locations mentioned or shown are based on real places in and around that neighborhood. Like Pentagon City mall, Springfield, the chrome diner. All of these spots are real spots. This one dude on Twitter @MisterYura actually lives in that area and photographed all of those spots at the angle that we used for them in the game!
What I personally think is groundbreaking about Class of 09, is that it’s the first anime or game that is very much based on one place and is culturally all of that place. We see media use big areas like Tokyo, of course, but those are usually just backdrops. This game is very much just D.C.
BWT: Yeah, the towniness of this game very much endeared it to me. And I was inspired to ask that question because I wanted to know if Kyler wearing a Redskins shirt was diegetic to the location or if it was just him getting away with gesturing towards a slur like kids did in my high school. [laughs]
Max: There are so many things that are censored in Class of 09, dude! [laughs] Back then people calling something gay or using another slur was just a part of language. We try to pretend that didn’t exist, but even some of the most liberal people I know today were talking like that back then.
The problem is when people refuse to change with the times. But yeah, a lot is censored in Class of 09, people used language like that more commonly back then than what’s in the game. Obviously you can’t ship a game with [laughs] ten million racial and homophobic slurs. That’s not okay. [laughs]
I did try to keep the politics in the game specific to the Beltway area, though. For instance, when Ari is discovered to be gay, I wanted to make it clear that this would be a problem in a place like Texas, but in a liberal place like Northern Virginia very few people would care if you were gay back then.
But there’s also the White Nationalism story route in the game, and that kind of speaks to how quickly Trumpism spread in the Beltway area. I don’t live there anymore, but when I came back I was surprised at how quickly it spread and how much less blue the area seemed to suddenly be. Like, when I was in high school, everyone wanted Obama to win, but when I spoke to someone there in high school, they said half the students were Trump supporters.
It’s interesting how quickly an area will change its political beliefs based on what’s going on at a global scale.
BWT: And that’s what I like most about Class of 09! How fully captures the culture of that time and shows how much things have changed since then.
Max: Yeah, we just came up 15 years since 2009.
BWT: Oh god, uuuuuugh…
Max: Yeah, we’re getting old. [laughs]
BWT: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview! Is there anything else you want to mention or promo?
Max: I think all the promo work is done.
I just want to thank everybody for enjoying the game. I want to thank everyone for baking it with their wallets. I want people to stay excited and that’s all I can ask for right now.
Class 09 The Re-Up is available now on Steam.
