High on Life, the new shooter from Squanch Games, has been hiding a little secret – a TV in the game contains over 20 animated shorts from Justin Roiland and friends, not to mention four fully licensed feature films.

During a hands-on with the game at Gamescom, we came across the TV, quickly realising that it was showing some fully-fledged commercial pariodies, some voiced by Roiland himself. We asked executive producer Matty Studivan about how much there was to watch, but didn’t expect the answer we got:

“So we’ve done a pretty weird thing. We have a TV in the living room in the game, and you can sit down and watch it. You know, Justin has been wanting to get back to Interdimensional Cable, which is a very popular Rick & Morty thing, so we’re trying to sort of emulate that, and we’ve made a bunch of animated shorts.”

Over 20 shorts have been made, by a number of animators. But their length seemingly pales in comparison to what else the TV contains:

“On top of that, we’ve also licensed four feature length movies, that you can watch in the game,” continued Studivan. “[Justin is] a big fan of Red Letter Media, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. He’s just a huge fan of that stuff, and he watches a lot of those movies, so he’s like ‘Why couldn’t we do something similar in the game?’ Nobody’s done it, so we were like, ‘Let’s figure out how to license some movies!'”

The movies are what Studivan describes as ‘Z-grade’, with the only one we know details on being Tammy & the T-Rex, a 1994 sci-fi comedy starring Denise Richards and Paul Walker. Over the course of the game, the movie being shown on TV will change, meaning you can take a break from hunting down vicious aliens and watch a flick every now and then.

And if that wasn’t enough, the team’s leaned even more into the MST3K inspiration by including a commentator: “On top of the shorts that we’ve made, we’ve also done sort of like a little Elvira intro character that will speak about the movie on the intro and outro, into the commercials,” finishes Studivan.

You’ll be able to see all of this in action when the game arrives on December 13 after suffering a short delay. We got a new gameplay trailer as part of Opening Night Live, which showed off a foul-mouthed boss fight.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.