At what speed do you listen to your Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks? This is a major topic of discussion in the fandom for Matt Dinniman’s LitRPG series. The books are about a post-apocalyptic future where an alien corporation has taken over Earth, using up all its resources and killing most the humans. The survivors are forced to participate in a televised reality competition called Dungeon Crawler World: Earth. Among those competitors is a Coast Guard veteran named Carl, who is accompanied by a talking cat named Princess Donut.
The series has become enormously popular, in large part because of its best-selling audiobooks performed by Jeff Hays. But fans often choose not to listen to Dinniman's lengthy books at the speed at which Hays performed them. On Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, and other online places where DCC fans congregate, listening speed is a hot topic, with some bragging about listening to the book at double its normal speed and beyond, while many wonder what’s wrong with the few people who listen to it at its standard 1.0 speed.
I personally feel anything above 1.5 is psycho.
At New York Comic Con, Polygon got a chance to sit down with author Dinniman. We asked about the progress of the upcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl live-action series and the future of LitRPG in general, but the most important query we had for him was all about the proper listening speed for DCC audiobooks.
Check out our conversation below.
Polygon: Fans have a lot of favorite characters. Would you ever be open to writing a spinoff starring another character?
Matt Dinniman: Well, we have the Crocodile comics coming out. We had the BackerKit campaign for it. That is a graphic novel based on the Florin character from Dungeon Crawler Carl. The way that worked was, I wrote a short story, basically a treatment, of what he did immediately before he went into the dungeon, all the way up through the first floor, and they turned it into a graphic novel. Michael Moreci wrote the script and Brett Bean is doing the art. It turned out great. Assuming the reception of that is good, once it's actually out, we may do that for a few others.
I don't anticipate writing another book — like another novel in the Dungeon Crawler Carl universe — when I'm done. I want to write other stuff. I’m working on the last book right now. It's going to be split into two books, but as far as I’m concerned, I am working on the last Dungeon Crawler Carl book right now.
The TV show is currently being developed. What’s the biggest change from the book to the TV show?
Well, I don't know yet. There's always going to be changes. It has to be changed because it doesn't translate perfectly. The best thing is, the people that are adapting it are all fans. They're all pretty protective of the source material. So we'll see.
Should we expect more practical effects or digital effects?
I don't know. We haven't gotten there yet. They're not done with the script yet.
How does it feel to be the leading name in LitRPG, which is a rising genre?
Well, LitRPG's been around for a while now. It started to become the term right around 2015. That's when people started hearing rumblings of that term. And my first book that I consider LitRPG came out in 2017, so it has been around for a while. There are plenty of authors in the LitRPG space who were doing some amazing things before me. I just happened to be the first one to get a pretty wide, traditional deal and then got it in the bookstores.
I was able to help my friends also get their books into bookstores too, because there's actually LitRPG sections popping up in bookstores now. And it's not just my books, there's other ones, like He Who Fights with Monsters, Noobtown, The Wandering Inn, Apocalypse Parenting, and on and on and on. All these books were staples of the LitRPG genre before I came into the bookstore space. I just happened to be first, but we'll see what happens in the next few years.
What do you see for the future of LitRPG?
What's happening right now is that there'll be more and more out there that are outside of that small-ish, indie, self-published community — more getting more wide releases. I see LitRPG expanding beyond the fantasy-themed ones. I suspect we'll get a lot of romance-themed LitRPGs, like dating sim-style stories, because if you look at Webtoons and webcomics in Asia, those style LitRPGs are already very popular. All of this comes from Asian manga and manhwa and web serial culture. All those guys are doing this first, so we're always like, two years behind.
You say you’re thinking of other projects, are they LitRPG?
Probably every once in a while, I'll write another LitRPG. What I'm working on right now is not LitRPG. I mean, I'm working on [Dungeon Crawler Carl] book nine right now, but I'm also working on another book that'll be released by Ace over at Penguin Random House. It's a super violent cozy fantasy.
Your books touch on a lot of different genres, from comedy to fantasy and others. Which genre comes the most easily to you?
I consider myself a horror writer first. The dark stuff is really easy for me. And I think strongly that horror and humor are two sides of the same coin, so that comes pretty easily for me as well. The interpersonal banter that happens between the heavy scenes, that's the stuff people put on TikTok, but the impact of the horror of the story is what really keeps them there.
A big part of this fandom is the audiobooks, which people like to listen to at different speeds. I'm curious how you feel about that, and if you feel like they're missing anything by listening at an accelerated speed.
I personally feel anything above 1.5 is psycho. People get mad when I say that. I personally listen to most audiobooks between 1.0 and 1.2 — sometimes maybe 1.25. But 1.3 and above for me, personally, kind of affects the performance.
Jeff Hays' delivery is really good, and there's nothing wrong with listening to them at 1.2, but I see people doing it at 2.3 and it's like chipmunks on bath salts. I mean, I guess it's fine. You're absorbing the story, but you're kind of missing out on the nuance of some of Jeff Hays' performance.