GamesBeat: I’m definitely all for the Hyper Funk Zone.
Johnson: I gotta put in some of that old-school stuff. That’s important. I wonder if I could even — maybe I’ll try to copy the placement of the levels. I tried playing it again recently, just to see. I used to be able to get all the way to the end when I was making the game. I played it every day for about a year. But I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t there in my brain.
GamesBeat: I’m always a big defender of Panic on Funkotron. I loved that game as a kid.
Johnson: Isn’t that funny? It’s almost a controversy, where people divide up into two sides. That’s always kind of amusing.
GamesBeat: You could say that you had an idea for the original that was a bit more unique, and then it went to something simpler as a 2D platformer, but to me it was a very different 2D platformer. It was still special.
Johnson: Yeah, I like that observation. That was certainly the goal. I wanted to make it feel both very cooperative and also very exploratory. Platformers are generally so reflexive. They’re all about timing. I find that for me that gets a little too fast. But it was a real challenge to try to figure out how to do that when we didn’t want to slow the gameplay down with the inventory and having all these different presents like in game one, making it more action-y.
Above: Get him! He’s ugly and must perish!
GamesBeat: I feel like it would be great if you could just kind of troll people and tell them the next Toe Jam & Earl is going to be a shooter or something. Just keep changing the genre every game.
Johnson: Toe Jam beefs up, Earl slims down, and they get some automatic weapons and kick butt. [Laughs] That would be pretty fun, to play that up and see what kind of reaction we get.
GamesBeat :I wrote about this game a bit when I was talking about the anniversary of the Genesis. One of the big takeaways for me was that it was so wonderfully weird. I had to wonder how this idea of combining hip-hop culture and sci-fi aesthetics came about in the first place.
Johnson: It’s funny. My most creative moments are in the shower. So forgive me for saying this, but I was in the shower this morning, oddly enough, thinking about creativity and boring my wife with this stream of thoughts about what creativity is and how you get off the rails into association-land, off the rails of causality and logic. It’s sort of this practice you do, where you get in the habit of looking for associations that aren’t causal. One thing makes you think of another thing and you just let it flow. I don’t know. In that particular instance, it just sort of stuck my funny bone with these characters. By the way, I’m half black. My dad’s black and my mom’s white. That comes out in some of the stuff I’ve built. I made Orly’s Draw-a-Story some years ago with a black girl as a main character.
Toe Jam & Earl, in my mind, comes from the black culture of the time, the way they talk, and the music I grew up with in the ’80s. That was a big part of me, what I’ve always loved. I guess it just kind of popped out, these two funny aliens, these two black dudes who were like, “Yo, whassup Big Earl?” “Whatchoo think about those Earthlings?” “They’re craaaaazy.”
Above: They certainly look crazy.
I had this whole dialogue in my head between these two characters that appealed to me. And then I thought of their ship, with these huge speakers thumping bass flying through outer space. I didn’t think too hard about it. But with Earth I thought about, well, what would Earth be like to these aliens? It wouldn’t make a lot of sense. It’d just be all this crazy stuff they didn’t understand. I just started spewing out all the crazy earthling stuff I could think of. That’s where the boogeyman, the ice cream truck, the shopper, the lady, the lawnmower man, the hula dancer, all that stuff came from. It’s funny. I get nostalgic about it too. It was a big part of my life. Your life has different chapters, you know? That was one that really stands out in my memory.
GamesBeat: It seems like a lot of people very specifically have that Genesis nostalgia. What do you think it is about that era that still sticks with people today?
Johnson: That’s a good question. You know Chris Waters, from GameSpot? I had lunch with him about a week ago. It’s the first time I got to know him. He’s interviewed me a couple of times, but we just sort of hung out, and we got into a discussion about that very topic. Why is it that nostalgia seems to be such a powerful force right now? What we came up with was a couple of things. One, it seems like we’re just at that age now. It happens that the games were just breaking back then. Around your 40s is when you really start to get nostalgic, really start looking back on your life. It’s when you have kids who are reaching an age where you want to share your childhood with them. That plus the social media phenomenon, where it’s so easy to tweet out, hey, remember this? Or post something on Facebook that’s meaningful. Then it just spreads. It’s like yawning in front of somebody. People catch it and then they spread it. That was kind of what we came up with as far as why. I don’t know. It’s just a cultural thing, too, one of our cultural memes right now. At least in the game industry. It’s like in the movies, where there’s a sort of retro trend, a revival of all these old properties. That’s about the extent of my insight on that. I don’t know for sure why.