In 2004, Clevinger said that if he was to do it over again, he would not have done a sprite comic because of the limitations of pre-existing art and the copyright issues, but continued to produce 8-Bit Theater because "It's paying the bills... And also, as much as I complain about the limiting factors, it's a lot of fun and I enjoy finding new ways to approach the material." The comic also included original artwork created by Lydia Tyree and Kevin Sigmund, who contributed hand drawn art and custom sprites respectively. The final page of the comic, an epilogue, was drawn by Matt Speroni. In a 2009 interview, Clevinger said that he typically spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings writing the comic, then spent the afternoons and evening putting the comic together. He used Adobe Photoshop to create the comic. 8-Bit Theater ended in 2010. Once completed, the comic had 1,225 pages. Premise 8-Bit Theater started out as a loose retelling and parody of the plot of Final Fantasy 1, and features exaggerated portrayals of characters from that game, including the main characters Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage. The group are ostensibly on a quest to find four elemental orbs to help them defeat Chaos, but the characters have no interest in the quest and mostly focus on furthering their own selfish goals. According to one reviewer, "The first change it makes [to the plot of Final Fantasy] is to turn the original protagonists into the three worst people in the world, plus Fighter. They lie, steal, and murder their way through the story, claiming to be heroes in the same way spam claims to be food. In their (very limited) defense, sometimes they just hurt people on accident... [the group goes] on a nine-year-tour of their world, marking their progress with new enemies, confused onlookers, and a whole lot of corpses." Clevinger described 8-Bit Theater in an interview as "a comic about the four people most ill-equipped to save the world who, through chicanery and brute ignorance, are the very people tasked with doing so. It's mostly a parody of fantasy and video game tropes, but a wide range of subjects are touched upon." The comic points out and dissects many of the tropes used in role-playing video games, especially those from Japan. A significant portion of the humor results from creating reader anticipation for dramatic moments