ToeJam and Earl 3

ToeJam and Earl, Sega’s original strangers in a strange land, return for the most funked-up adventure the Xbox has ever seen …

“Can we ask you a question?”

Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger, creators of the goofy video game characters ToeJam and Earl, are plopped down on the floor of an office somewhere in northern California. Funk music wafts out of speakers from a computer, and Johnson, the taller and more introspective of the two, has just turned a perfectly decent interview on its ear. “What’s your explanation for why ToeJam and Earl has hit the spot with so many people?” he asks. “Why do you think it’s resonated?”

It’s a good question, and one not easily answered. It seems unlikely that a game starring two aliens, one essentially a big yellow pudding in sneakers and the other a three-legged, medallion-wearing, cherry-Popsicle-with-bug-eyes-looking-thing, would stand the test of time. Yet ToeJam and Earl, released for the Saga Genesis when George W. Bush’s daddy held the presidency, managed to do just that—and then some. A sort of child’s daydream (complete with a herd of nerds and a malicious yet whimsical boogeyman) brought to life on a 16-bit console, Earl gained a cult following with its unique characters and quirky play. Now, some 10-plus years after the fact, people are paying upwards of $50 for a copy of the game on eBay.com and Voorsanger and Johnson have their eyes on the skies and their buttocks on the floor, preparing to hype ToeJam and Earl III: All Funked Up for the Xbox.

Bring forth the funk. When the 12 Sacred Albums of Funk are stolen from their home on the planet Funkotron, the planet-hopping ToeJam and Earl are dispatched by the Great Funkopotomus to retrieve them. The dynamic duo is dispatched to the mudball Earth, the wacky little nowhere that was the setting for the original ToeJam and Earl. With the never-before-seen Latisha—a pretty Funkotronian femme with blue skin and enough jewelry to shame Mr. T many times over—along for the ride, ToeJam and Earl must retrieve the holy platters of funk while simultaneously converting the locals to a more enlightened and funkified state of existence.

“We’re on kind of mission—a secret mission,” Johnson says. “A lot of people who make games take things very seriously, and you have to look at the word ‘play’ and wonder, what’s that all about? Serious/play, serious/play—they don’t seem to really go together. Well, I guess they do, but to the detriment of the word ‘play.’ Our secret mission is to bring a little more lightheartedness into the world of video game play, because so much of it is so intense.”

If “lighthearted” was currency, ToeJam and Earl III could rightly be redeemed for, say, The Mona Lisa or, perhaps, Guam. Insane dentists with drills scamper throughout the game’s levels, a wise man in a carrot suit augments our heroes’ abilities when they’ve gained enough experience, there’s a Yeti who jabs a mean pencil, a decidedly African-American Santa Funk, warbling country-western singers, and psychotic mailboxes. ToeJam, Earl, and Latisha will be also harangued by humans aplenty such as peppy cheerleaders with oversized smiles, hulking construction workers, and fat-bodied tourists in skimpy clothing. The message here, simply, and as stated by cartoonist Walt Kelly is, we have met the enemy and he is us.

“Satire is a valuable form of humor,” Johnson says. “It lets you step outside yourself and see things in a different way. We’ve had so much fun with the construction worker whose personality is, you know, he’s trying to be cool: ‘I am up with that, Homey-man! I am inside the house!’ Or the cheerleader who says, ‘Gimme a B! Gimme a G! What’s that spell? Bg!’”

ToeJam and Earl III brings the Funkotronians into 3D for the first time, and the game threatens to be gorgeous. Environments, be they bucolic meadows decorated with bunnies and flowering gardens or snow-choked wastelands framed by a magnificent recreation of the Northern Lights, show an enormous amount of detail. Bright colors dominate, and the Xbox’ graphics muscle enables the developers at Visual Concepts to perfectly imprint Earl III with the look and feel of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Even the characters themselves are endowed by their creators with a wealth of extra-special touches, like the tattoo on Earl’s back that looks mysteriously like the swirl seen on the top of every Sega Dreamcast console.

Both Voorsanger and Johnson are quick to point out ToeJam and Earl III utilizes characters and gameplay elements from both ToeJam and Earl and its sequel ToeJam and Earl: Panic on Funkotron. That said, they’re even more quick to note that III is a lot more like the original than the oft-maligned side-scroller Panic. Fans of the series will recognize the gift-wrapped presents holding special items such as spring shoes or Icarus wings, the bucks that can be used to purchase food and other goodies, the elevators that enable travel to new areas, and even such well-loved funk tunes as The Big Earl Bump that serve as musical accompaniment to the on-screen happenings.

Do not expect a straight remake, though: “[ToeJam and Earl III] is an amalgam of elements we hope will make our original fans flip with joy and elements that we hope will make people who’ve never seen the ToeJam and Earl universe look at it and go, ‘ Oh, I get this. I know what I’m doing here,’ and then be surprised by what they find,” Voorsanger says.

Gameplay emphasizes exploration, and pushes an agenda that’s strictly whimsical. Humans can be converted to the ways of funk by ToeJam, Earl, or Latisha by means of a “funk-fu” attack or the more powerful “funkify shot.” Rhythm-based mini-games enable our extraterrestrial heroes to pacify the locals and defeat various boss characters. Gospel singers dispense special “funk notes” and Santa’s little elves, when touched, drop presents. It’s possible to talk to any character by pressing the Xbox controller’s black button, and humorous quips often result: “You don’t mind if I run behind you?” the obviously smitten ToeJam will ask Latisha. Effeminate sharks haunt the game’s water-heavy levels, chickens cluck with excitement as they hurl their mortars around, and a special “funk- mobile” represents the ultimate in funk-conversion technology—Voorsanger and Johnson described the original ToeJam and Earl as being almost stream-of-consciousness; this new game deepens and widens the stream to, perhaps, an ocean.

An early version of Earl III, candy for the eyes and some delicious parfait for the hands, was a harbinger of great things to come. As players navigate Earl ‘s Earth, day passes into night and back again; at nighttime, humans go to sleep and begin to snore, and hidden presents give off tiny sparkles of light. Houses can be approached for some trick-or-treat action, and stores offer gift-wrapped goodies and delicious sushi that prompts the rotund Earl to note, “ All food is good food.” Up-tempo bass-fueled beats hum and thump while the aliens explore their surroundings-and collecting funk albums allows players to select different tunes.

The game supports one-player action, but is really meant to be played cooperatively. Two people can step into III and roam about freely; the game screen splits horizontally when the characters move apart from one another. Characters can share health by exchanging high-fives and pesky humans are funkified a lot more easily when they’re double-teamed.

Neither Voorsanger nor Johnson is big fan of revealing specifics about how many different humans (35 or so), presents (70-ish), or zones (five) ToeJam and Earl III contains. Instead, they’re more content to talk about the game as a whole, and the philosophy behind it. “We’ve got tons of music; the characters are rich, they have personality, they have relationships with each other,” Johnson says. “The world, even though you wouldn’t think this at first glance, has a consistency and an integrity of its own—there is a ToeJam and Earl universe. The game is a big play space. It’s not a puzzle, it’s a place you can get dropped into; you’ve got a lot of choices, things you can do, characters you can talk to. It’s a place for you to experience yourself in our universe.”

The strangers in a strange land will touch down later this year and ToeJam and Earl III will be an Xbox exclusive. Johnson and Voorsanger summed it up best on their company’s Web site (http://www.tjande.com/LaunchPad.html) when they wrote, “The game would never have come close (on any platform) to what it will be when we launch on Xbox this fall.”

Staring off into space pays off for Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger

A brief history of man reveals that, for a very long time, absolutely nothing happened. Then, in 1991, ToeJam and Earl was released for the Sega Genesis. And it was good.

The game featured the two zany aliens ToeJam and Earl as they traveled the Earth hunting down the pieces of their now-wrecked spaceship. The idea was simple: save the aliens, find those spaceship parts, and get the heck off the planet.

A side-scrolling sequel titled ToeJam and Earl: Panic on Funkotron followed, but failed to capture the magic of the original. Mark Voorsanger, co-founder of ToeJam and Earl Productions explains, “When we came off ToeJam and Earl, although we had some proponents at Sega, there were those people who were completely confused by the title. When we talking about ToeJam and Earl II, we were casting about how we were going to structure this game to address marketing issues and all of that. A lot of the feedback we were getting kind of pushed in certain directions that we weren’t 100 percent excited about going, but we thought just for fun, we’d put together a proposal. So we had our artist draw the characters—Earl slimmed down, ToeJam buffed up, ToeJam’s on Earl’s shoulders and he’s holding this huge gun—and he’s going to kick some Earthling butt! We wrote this up in a one-paragraph proposal and sent it off to Sega—and they flipped, they loved the idea. They said, ‘Finally! You guys are coming around! You understand what the game market really wants!” And we were like, ‘Uh, it was a joke! We’re not planning on making this game.’”