Back in the day, there were few games we played more on our Sega Mega Drive / Genesis than the 1991 title ToeJam & Earl and its 1993 sequel ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron.
A collaboration between the developer Johnson & Voorsanger Productions and the publisher Sega, the two games were undoubtedly some of the stranger family-friendly titles released for Sega's 16-bit console, focusing on a pair of funk-obsessed aliens as they embark on adventures filled with Looney-Tunes-esque slapstick humour and colourful and unconventional enemies.
Just recently, we had the amazing opportunity to chat with ToeJam & Earl co-creator Greg Johnson to get an update about ToeJam & Earl's upcoming movie (which you can read more about here), and we have since sat down with him again over a video call for a more in-depth conversation about the history of the series. During our conversation, we spoke about the influence of Rogue and the animated film Heavy Metal on the original game, as well as what it was like working with Sega, and why he is still excited to be making games all these years later. You can read this conversation with Johnson below (slightly edited for clarity and length).
Time Extension: So the perfect way to start would probably be to ask you the question you've had a million times before: how did the idea for ToeJam & Earl originally come about? We've read in the past that it was the characters that came to you first. Is that correct?
Johnson: Yeah, that's true. And when I mentioned to you [before the interview] that there was something I hadn't told anybody yet it's actually in regards to that.
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. This friend was the head of marketing in Japan at the time ToeJam & Earl was released, and then he was head of marketing at the time ToeJam & Earl III released. So he has a very strong connection to TJ&E and we were talking about it.
I mentioned to him that I had told people in interviews that I had a dream about ToeJam and Earl and I woke up in the middle of the night and I wrote down a conversation between the two of them and then the next morning I woke up and read it and I did a little sketch of these characters and that's where it started. And that's true. But our brains work in funny ways: you see one thing or hear something and it sticks with you and then it pops out again later in some other form.
So when I was talking to him I said, 'There's this thing that's been bugging me for years because I feel like I saw this animated thing when I was much younger and I think that might actually be the genesis of the concept in my brain. There were these two aliens who were in a spaceship smoking a reefer.' And he said, 'Yeah, that's Heavy Metal'. And I looked it up and yeah, that was from 1981 and Toe Jam and Earl was 1990.
So I found this animation and I thought, 'Damn, I think this is why ToeJam and Earl sprang into my brain 10 years later.' It emerged in a dream. I mean through the '80s I was making Starflight which was another game about crazy aliens and so I sort of had aliens on the brain already. It was not a surprise that I was dreaming about aliens. I did quite literally almost every night. But when I saw that animated short, I thought, 'Okay, there's too much coincidence there. That's got to be what sparked ToeJam & Earl.' So anyway, that was just a fun little tidbit.
Also, another thing that's kind of fun that I don't know that I've ever really talked about — it might be in some article somewhere — is my friend Mike was reminding me about the original design of the Anti-Funk character in ToeJam & Earl III that Sega vetoed. He was saying, 'Hey, you know when you were going to release ToeJam & Earl III, I was the guy at Sega who nixed the Klu Klux Klan hat on the anti-funk.' So I had the major bad guy in the game — the anti-funk — he was wearing a hat that looked like the KKK and Mike had said, 'Yeah, I don't think we should do that from a marketing perspective'.
And, in ToeJam & Earl 1, we had the wizard who was originally going to be an Archbishop. That's why I think the audio for that is still the hallelujah sound when you get healed. And he had his miter and his Archbishop hat. The marketing folks at Sega said they didn't want that in the game either. So we changed it to a wizard.
Time Extension: That's interesting to hear because we've previously read in an old Sega Visions article that you thought of the characters on a beach in Hawaii, which is slightly different of course from the story you've just told us. We are wondering, what was the influence then of Hawaii on the game? If any?
Johnson: So I think that was probably a not-quite-accurate quote or something from some interview. I did go to Hawaii once way back when and I did think about the game and have some more ideas when I was relaxed. That's probably why there are hula girls in the game and the hot tub, but it's not really the genesis of the game. It's hard to know now what I even said or what got printed. But I know there were a couple of times too when I got kind of "punchy".
I was doing a lot of interviews at one point and it was hard to come up with new stuff to say. You don't want to be boring or say the same thing over and over again. So I think I made up something crazy once and I said, 'I took all the ideas for all the presents and I put them on Post-it notes and then I tossed my cat into the room and saw which Post-it notes stuck to her feet', which is totally made up. I mean it's totally crazy. I didn't do that, but I was just feeling particularly punchy one night.
Time Extension: So how did you go from having this idea of two characters to thinking they should be the star of their own video game? Because, in terms of iconic duos, it seemed that Mario and Luigi at the time were still almost just palette swaps of each other with only very minor differences. And Sonic 2 hadn't come out yet and introduced Tails. Were there any games, in particular, that inspired you?
Johnson: Yeah, no it hadn't. In fact, we were actually in line to be Sega's mascot character. Sega US wanted us in that spot and we were very excited about it. But, as you are probably very well aware, Japanese gaming companies are run from Japan, not from the U.S. So those decisions don't happen on the U.S. side.
So the U.S. folks were all excited about this and got us excited and then the word from Japan came down like, 'No, no, no, we've got our character. That's gonna be our mascot. It's Sonic.' So we were bummed. And they expressly said, 'ToeJam & Earl is too American. It's too culturally specific to the US.'
So anyway, that all made sense. But, in regards to your question, the inspiration behind having two characters, the co-op play, and the dynamic split screen didn't come from any other game.
You've probably heard me say this before if you've seen any interviews because I always say this, and it's true, but ToeJam & Earl just fell straight out of my obsession with Rogue when I was in college. I was playing that on the college computer at three in the morning on this little terminal, and I didn't sleep and I didn't study because I just got obsessed with playing that game.
ToeJam & Earl just fell straight out of my obsession with Rogue when I was in college. I was playing that on the college computer at three in the morning on this little terminal, and I didn't sleep and I didn't study because I just got obsessed with playing that game.
So it was just me saying, 'How can I share that with somebody? Because I want to co-op adventure.' And so the idea of the split screen was nothing that I had seen before. It wasn't from anything. I mean, there were split screens, so it wasn't a huge, huge new idea, but the idea of making it dynamic was the new thing — having it split and unsplit based on where you were. The folks at Sega said, 'It won't do that, the hardware just won't do it.' And Mark Voorsanger, my partner in crime at the time, said, 'I think I can do it.' And I said, 'Great. Let's show them. Let's do it.' So he did.
Time Extension: We were going to ask specifically about the name: ToeJam & Earl. Where did those two names come from? Also, was that a hard sell for the name of the game, or was Sega happy to sign off on that being the title? It's obviously a little out there.
Johnson: We never got any pushback on the name, and I don't even know where it came from now. It just sort of popped out that next day after my dream when I wrote down the characters and the little sketches.
The fellow at Sega who was in charge of this at the time was named Hugh Bowen and he was great. He was a very relaxed, very kind of casual, fun guy who just loved the whole idea and became a champion for it in the company. And then the other guy — the marketing guy — who was the other champion was Al Nilsen. And they just accepted it. So I don't know. Nobody ever asked [us to change it]. And people knew it was a little outside the box and weird. But the only thing we ever got from them was some head scratching, going, 'How are we going to sell this? It's so different from everything else we've got. We're not really sure how to position it.' But they were great!
In some sense, it really was a golden era because people weren't jaded and every week or every month there was something new coming out that hadn't been done before. You could tell you were in a growing new industry that was going to be bringing people a lot of joy and it was just a lot of fun. It was not without stress obviously. There was always stress, but it was very different than today's environment with — what is it now? How many games were released on Steam last year?
Time Extension: We're not exactly sure. It's a ridiculous amount.
Johnson: Yeah, it's just mind-boggling the amount of content that's out there in terms of the amount of dollars and competition, and it's a totally different vibe.
Time Extension: We'd also love to ask you about ToeJam & Earl's music and John Baker's involvement. He was the musician for the first two games, if we're correct. We're wondering, how did you meet him and get him on board? Also, how did that whole kind of musical direction come about? Because that's something that's obviously become so integral to the identity of the series.
Johnson: Yeah, so it was actually started with a fellow named Mark Miller. He also worked on the music. But he was more on the technical side and he was doing the instrumentation. His thing was trying to get a 16-bit machine to have real-sounding instrumentation — a real-sounding bass, a good-sounding kick drum, and stuff like that.
And so, he was kind of a whiz at that and then he introduced me to John Baker, and of course, John is an amazing composer and a sweetheart guy. They're both super nice. Also, I also have a penchant for making music. I don't play anything but I sing songs and I like to just make up stuff in general. And so I made up a lot of bass lines and then I would sing them to John and he would go, 'Okay, yeah, I get that. I can work with that.' And so he'd take that and turn it into a song. Half of the songs he just did on his own, but some of them I came up with, like the theme song — I think that one was from me. And that's how I enjoyed working too on ToeJam & Earl 4: Back in the Groove.
When we did a Kickstarter for Back in the Groove and released an album, we had a whole lot of new songs as well as remakes of the old songs and I was working with a fellow named Burke Trieschmann of Open Door Production, who had coincidentally gone to the same college I went to: Colorado College. We started working together, and he helped me build songs with this fellow named Cody Wright. I don't know if you've heard of him, but Cody's phenomenal, like a total superstar in the bass world. He's just insane. And he wrote to me and said, 'Hey, man, how about if I do all of the songs for your game? I'll do it for free, and I'll fly out there from North Carolina. Because it was your game that got me started playing bass.' And I was like, 'Wow, sweet, okay.' So that's we did.
Time Extension: It's probably hard to remember specifics, but if you had to pick some musicians and acts that you were listening to back in the day when you were first working on ToeJam and Earl, who immediately springs to mind in terms of that funk sound?
Johnson: Herbie Hancock is probably the first one that pops into my mind. You'll listen to some of his songs and you'll go 'Oh that's Toe Jam & Earl.' Then there are other old-school funk bands from the late 80s and the early 90s, like The Gap Band or Dazz Band. And, of course, Parliament, Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. I listened to them a lot in those days. There's a ton of them.
Time Extension: Another thing that comes up a lot in regards to ToeJam & Earl is this idea of it being a sleeper hit or the fact that it didn't initially sell well. Given that you guys were a new company, we're wondering did you sort of have a backup plan like if the game didn't pick up in sales? Or were you counting on the game being a success?
Johnson: No, it was a different world. We were just two young guys. We didn't really think of it as a business. We were just having fun and it was just us. We rented an office and said like, 'Hey, you want to do this?' and 'Sure. It sounds like fun. Let's see what happens.' So we weren't thinking of it in terms of making money or having a business or, you know, our future security and anything like that. It was just --
We were just two young guys. We didn't really think of it as a business. We were just having fun and it was just us. We rented an office and said like, 'Hey, you want to do this?' and 'Sure. It sounds like fun. Let's see what happens.' So we weren't thinking of it in terms of making money or having a business or, you know, our future security and anything like that
Time Extension: The game was its own reward?
Johnson: Yeah, exactly. That's all we were really focused on and it was great. I'm still good friends with Mark. He's a sweetheart guy, really nice. And we had a blast. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do a random game and a co-op game too. Actually, I'm not sure the cause and effect there. I'm not sure if that was a reason or if it just turned out to be a great thing and I then convinced myself later I was smart and there was a reason. Maybe not.
But we had fun because we could play it over and over again and not get bored. And the two of us just sat there and listened to music and played and then it was like 'Hey, let's do this, let's add that' and Mark would go to his computer and whip up something or I would go make some artwork.
Time Extension: Something else we have to ask you about is the original version of Panic on Funkotron. From what we've heard, it was originally going to be a lot more similar to the first game before it became a side-scroller. We're wondering, could you maybe talk a little bit about the ideas that you had in mind before this change? Also, did any prototypes of that survive, or has it all disappeared into the ether?
Johnson: Yeah, yeah, that's all way, way gone into the depths of time, I'm afraid. But we did actually build it. It wasn't just a plan.
We had gotten about three or four months into building the next game. We had it working. You could run around and I remember we had these like giant crystals and these houses that didn't have roofs and walls so you could go into the houses. We also had plans to go into caves too, and all this other stuff, but it was essentially ToeJam and Earl 1 again, just kind of reimagined.
I think we hadn't started building this, but we were also going to have a little dog or something that followed them around and then in game three we were going to do that again. We didn't end up doing that there either. But yeah, when we had a conversation with Sega marketing and I can't remember who initiated it, they said to us, 'Hey, we'd love it if you would really consider changing course and doing a sidescroller because we feel like that would be much better for the market.'
Their argument was, 'We haven't seen the kind of performance we were hoping for with game one and we think it's because the market doesn't quite know what to do with this game. We think we could do a better job selling it if we understood it better.' So me and Mark were both affable chappies and we wanted to please. So we just said, 'Okay, well, you guys are the experts. If that's what you think. We'll drop what we've been doing and switch gears and do our best to try to translate the crazy exploration and cooperative play into a side-scroller'.
Time Extension: Was the challenge of doing that what excited you about that new direction? Because the impression that we've always got is that there was some disappointment there in having to switch direction but speaking to you now, it doesn't sound like that's really the case. It sounds as if you got the message and you just kind of willingly switched courses. So we're wondering, what was it that excited about this new direction from Sega? Because Panic on Funkotron still has a lot of the same charm as the original. It definitely doesn't feel phoned-in or like a by-the-numbers type product.
Johnson: No, you got that right, completely. I'm sure we were bummed. At first, it's hard to let go of what you've been working on and excited about. So I probably did, you know, quite genuinely say something like that in some earlier interview, but I don't remember bitching a lot or throwing anything against the wall or stamping my feet. I remember me and Mark sitting down and saying, 'What do you think? What do you say? Should we do it?' And we were both going 'Well yeah, probably we should. We need these guys behind us. We've got to get them excited about what we're doing, or why do it?'
So initially it wasn't because we were excited about the side-scrolling concept, it was because we wanted to make Sega happy. That was quite genuine — we wanted them as an excited, motivated partner. And then, once we made the decision, that was the point at which we started applying ourselves to the challenge and getting excited about it because you don't see it all immediately. It took a little while for the pieces to start coming together and for us to go, 'Okay, well, how are we going to make it feel like you're exploring?' Because that's what ToeJam & Earl is about. So, 'how are we going to translate this sense of discovery and surprise, and the craziness of the ToeJam & Earl 1 into a platforming framework? How do we do that?'
It took a while, but we came up with a whole bunch of ideas such as the stuff hidden in the platforms and the funk moves and the swimming under the water and all kinds of other fun things. Like shaking the trees and bowling balls falling out to bonk you on the head or an earthling, and then you've got to scramble and throw the jars at them. All of that stuff started falling together. Then there was the idea of showing Funkotron and showing this living world.
Kirk Henderson was the artist for that game. I'm trying to remember how we discovered Kirk, I think he was a friend of another artist of mine actually. And Kirk was amazing. He did such beautiful artwork for this home world that it sort of brought it to life and we ended up being really, really excited about having gone down that path because we wouldn't ever have done it on our own.
From a marketing perspective, I've been told that it probably wasn't the most profitable avenue because we confused our fan base who wanted a sequel and they got a whole completely different game. So I think we disoriented people more than anything and in retrospect, I probably wouldn't have done that. But I can't say I'm sorry because we made a really really neat game.
It's funny, sometimes constraints and requirements can be just the thing to stimulate your creativity, right? If you have an open blank page, you tend to do things you've done before. But if you're told, 'Well, it has to be like this and this, and you can't do that, it's gotta be that', you start scratching your head. You might complain, but then you come up with new stuff.
Time Extension: Another interesting thing we came across in preparation for this interview was a news report about an agreement with GT Interactive to bring a third ToeJam & Earl game to the N64. Was there any work actually done on that? Or was that pretty much just something that got reported and didn't really amount to much?
Johnson: Yeah, more the latter. Nothing ever actually got done and I honestly can't even really remember what conversations happened or what intentions there were so I'm not sure.
You know, the fans would often get very excited about something and something would kind of blow up and it didn't necessarily have much correlation to what was actually happening.
We did build a Dreamcast version of ToeJam & Earl III and we got close to being done or about two-thirds of the way done with that. And that's gotten out since then. Somebody found it on an old Dreamcast, duplicated it, and released it, which is great. I love that. It's really neat that it got seen.
Time Extension: Yeah, we were wondering about your opinion on that stuff. Because some people can be a bit like, 'It's not done, I don't want people to see it.' But just in terms of the concept of game preservation and the idea of being able to see the development of that project over time, we think it's amazing. It seems like you feel the same.
Johnson: Yeah, I'm all with you. I'm on the same page. I'm excited that it gets out. I hate keeping secrets and you know I love the fact that people are excited about the history of gaming. ToeJam & Earl has a place in that history, as does Starflight. So I'm excited about it.
I mean I've been in this industry since 1982 making indie games. How many folks can say that? It's like, partly because I'm just old and still here, kicking it and making games. But I stick with it because I also love the potential and I love the whole idea of being a part of that history. It just makes me feel honored and it's really cool, right? So I love it when people talk about it. I love that you contacted me and want to know about the history and spending a lot of your time on this, which I think is amazing.
I got into making games because I thought it would be fun. You know, I was going to do communication research with marine mammals when I was in school, and I didn't go to grad school. I did this as a side thing. I thought I'd do it for a year or two. But one of the things that's kind of fallen out of it is that I've gotten so many messages over the years from fans — a lot of them ToeJam & Earl fans — who have shared their lives and their life stories.
They've told me what part in their lives the game has played like how this was the one game they played with their parents who have passed now or how the game connected them and their siblings and it's a family tradition every year when they get together at Christmas or whatever. I never expected that. I just didn't know that was gonna be part of my life. And it's become one of the main things that motivates me to want to stay in this business is realizing that it touches people in ways I can't predict.
We'd like to thank Johnson for taking the time to chat with us.