YYou know how it is. In a minute, you're sneaking up on Santa, ready to pull some super high-top sneakers out of his cheery gloves, when suddenly a ghost ice cream truck announces its arrival with an almighty honk. You are quick to search for gifts that might help, but, having randomized twice, you are as likely to unleash a torrent of tomato rain as a life-saving boombox.
If none of this fills you with nostalgia, maybe you missed out on the gonzo pleasures of ToeJam and Earl, this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of its launch at the Sega Megadrive. An unexpected success for all, the game became a resounding cult classic that spawned a series of sequels, each of which is an ambitious attempt to replicate the charm of the original.
The 1991 game follows the story of two rap-loving aliens who crash into Earth and begin attempting to rebuild their spaceship, only to find a variety of pesky Earthlings in their path. With the help of various gift-wrapped presents that can hinder and aid the protagonists, they attempt to escape from our ridiculous planet and return to their own.
Falling in love is one of the many pitfalls the couple must face on their journey, and it was one that I instantly succumbed to when I was six years old. Offering a co-operative two-player mode simultaneously, a gameplay that was almost non-existent at the time, as well as the ability to play randomly generated levels at all times, ToeJam and Earl it was incredibly fun and highly playable.
In 1991, of course, I didn't know that I would one day interview the game's creator, Greg Johnson, via a Zoom link to his home in Hawaii to NME. As he tells it, Johnson's idea for ToeJam and Earl It began in a rather picturesque style, conveying the game's unusual premise to programmer Mark Voorsanger during a hike up California's Mount Tamalpais in 1989.
"I came up with this crazy idea of โโthese two aliens crashing on earth, how we would turn things around and earthlings are the bad guys who chase aliens," explains Johnson. Voorsanger loved it, and to the couple's surprise, so did Sega. At the time, the company was desperate to find colorful, branded pets to compete with. Nintendo, and for a while, it seemed like the Funkotron duo might be the perfect fit.
โThere was a time when the folks at Sega of America were really excited about our title and they'd say, 'Hey, we think these could be our Mario characters. These could be our pets, 'โJohnson says. "And we kind of had our illusions that they might be right, I guess." It wasn't going to be: roughly halfway through development, a certain blue hedgehog ran to the scene and filled those boots dramatically.
However, the company knew they had something unique on their hands. It was not only ToeJam and Earl visually and stylistically unmatched by anything else on the market at the time, too sounded amazing, mixing quirky synth-based funk and rap beats that somehow felt perfectly at home on a 16-bit sound card.
It was not entirely accidental. Growing up in Los Angeles as the son of a Russian mother and an African-American father, Johnson was already in love with the music of the period when he graduated from high school in 1977: Herbie Hancock, Dazz Band, Parliament. "Everybody was listening to that music, playing 'Low Rider' with boomboxes on their shoulders and things like that," he recalls. "So that was my world growing up, and it's what I loved."
With composer John Baker and audio engineer Mark Miller, the team set out to create one of the most memorable video game soundtracks of its time. The music in ToeJam and Earlwritten and recorded at the beginning of the decade, it dovetailed perfectly with the neon hues and wavy lines of the title sequence to forge something totally of its time: a Fresh Prince of Bel Air aesthetic that brought cartoon hip hop into rooms around the world.
It turns out that one of those bedrooms belonged to a young Macaulay Culkin. After the Home alone The star tweeted in 2018 to let the world know what he was up to. Instead of watching the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, Johnson was surprised to be informed that one of Culkin's favorite activities for the night was performing. ToeJam and Earl.
Here are some things I'm doing instead of looking at the #oscars
5. Toejam & Earl pic.twitter.com/w2jWutHw83
- Macaulay Culkin (@IncredibleCulk) March 5, 2018
Johnson immediately reached out to the former child actor, not really waiting for a response. But before long the couple got in touch and Culkin was flying from Los Angeles with his brother and his friend Stu. "We spent three days together playing the two old games," recalls Johnson. โWe even play handcrafted ToeJam and Earl board game I made in the 90's. "
At the time of Culkin's arrival, a third ToeJam and Earl The sequel was in the works at the time, following two decidedly unpredictable follow-ups of the original, both of which had been riddled with interference from marketing teams eager to bring the franchise on trend. From 1993 ToeJam & Earl at Panic On FunkotronFor example, it was already underway when the suits stepped in to demand a more modern side-scrolling platformer.
After years in a relative desert, ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth I was met with a similar fate, already somewhat compromised by interference from mid-production when it hit Xbox in 2002. "I wish I had stood my ground a little longer," Johnson now admits. โBut you know, when an editor says, 'You're not paying the bills, it's our money at risk and this is what we think the market wants,' you think, okay, that's a good point. It is not my money that is at risk, and maybe you know what is best. "
So in 2018, Culkin asked what he could do to help with the next project. The group had just played a demo version of a new title that Johnson's HumaNature Studios had been working on, and this time the mission was clear: the game would be funded by Kickstarter, and more importantly, it would eventually be the one that brought it back. the spirit. from the 1991 original.
Johnson quickly appointed Culkin to executive producer of what would become ToeJam & Earl: Back In The Groove, even adding an unlockable "bunny ears" feature that allows players to hit each other with tomatoes, as apparently Culkin used to do with his brother as a child. Despite some initially tepid reviews, a subsequent update has made the game what fans have been yearning for for the better part of three decades: a true makeover of a classic.
Where it succeeded most admirably was to bring back the beautiful weirdness of the game. It is important to recognize that ToeJam and Earl represented something of a watershed moment in both character design and gameplay, offering a couple of main characters who were both witty and clueless in a way that the lazy culture of the early '90s simply hadn't seen outside of. tv shows like The Ren and Stimpy Show or later, Beavis and Butthead.
Both characters were also identified with code black in a world of white earthlings, as well as being literally aliens, a trope that was reflected in the deeply white world of video game design at the time. Cultural diversity is something Johnson is passionate about: โIt's something I've felt is missing in the world of video games,โ he tells me.
โThat's why my studio is called HumaNature Studios, it's like, where is humanity, you know? Where are all the people you see in movies and books, the real people, the real cultures? Everything is very generic. " ToeJam and Earl, the players were introduced to a couple of outsiders in every way; When Johnson talks about growing up a biracial gaming nerd with a comb in his hair, it's hard not to feel like some of his own character slipped into the coding.
Beyond that, its innovative qualities as a fundamentally cooperative game meant that, for the first time on a major console, gamers working together at the same time. ToeJam and Earl is a game that rewards altruism and community thinking. Its relatively slow pace means that it is also, in a way, an ambient game. Long before open world adventures soared to the heights of titles like Breath of the wildIt felt like a universe that he could explore more or less at his own pace.
Perhaps that is why, when the first COVID-19 crash hit, it ended up becoming an unlikely mental health lifeline for me and my family, specifically my mother, who still loves the game. We stayed sane by playing individual games of ToeJam and Earl through video calls when we could no longer see each other face to face. Away from an outside world that had grown increasingly hostile and uncontrollable, he was a miraculous little source of comfort.
In relaying my story to Johnson, there is no question that he is excited by the nostalgic feel that the game still produces. But he also talks enthusiastically about future projects: A Hollywood movie and TV series are in the works, he says, although he can't reveal too much about that yet. He's also working on a new project with E-Line Media, getting lyrical about his unerring passion for what he believes video games can achieve.
โI am excited to meet people in the industry who have a similar mission to mine and who want to share cultural games, both outwardly, so that a culture can share its culture with the rest of the world, but also inwardly - face so that a culture can share it with its own youth and instill pride in its culture, โhe says.
โThat way they have a way of connecting and crossing the border between what is often a very traditional culture and the modern world, which can be very disorienting for young people. A video game can be a wonderful bridge for that. "
ToeJam and Earl I bridged to worlds I could never have imagined, sometimes on Icarus wings, sometimes on rocket skates, often reconnecting with the joys of childhood that unexpectedly bled into an anxious present. For a quirky game about eluding the world's boogiemen and finally returning home, his legacy deserves to be cemented for generations to come.
Matthew Neale is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to NME. Toejam and Earl is playable now, as long as you can find a Mega Drive.
