“We spent three days together playing both of the old games,” Johnson recalls.
But before long the pair were in touch, and Culkin was flying out from LA with his brother and their friend Stu. Johnson immediately reached out to the former child actor, not really expecting to hear back. Here's some things I'm doing instead of watching the #oscarsĥ. After the Home Alone star tweeted in 2018 to let the world know what he was doing instead of watching the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, Johnson was surprised to be informed that one of Culkin’s preferred activities for the evening was playing ToeJam & Earl. One of those bedrooms, it turns out, belonged to a young Macaulay Culkin. The music in ToeJam & Earl, written and recorded at the turn of the decade, tied in perfectly with the title sequence’s neon hues and squiggly lines to forge something utterly of its era: a Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air aesthetic that brought cartoon hip hop into bedrooms across the world. Roping in composer John Baker and audio engineer Mark Miller, the team set about creating one of the most memorable video game soundtracks of its era. “So that was kind of my world growing up, and it’s what I loved.” “Everybody was listening to that music, playing ‘Low Rider’ with boomboxes on their shoulders and stuff like that,” he recalls. Growing up in Los Angeles as the child of a Russian mother and an African-American father, Johnson was already smitten with the music of the era when he graduated high school in 1977: Herbie Hancock, Dazz Band, Parliament. Not only was ToeJam & Earl visually and stylistically incomparable to anything else on the market at the time, it also sounded incredible, blending extravagant synth-based funk and rap beats that somehow felt perfectly at home on a 16-bit sound card. Nonetheless, the company knew they had something unique on their hands. “And we’d kind of gotten our hopes up that they could be right I suppose.” It wasn’t to be: about halfway through development, a certain blue hedgehog raced onto the scene and filled those boots quite spectacularly. These could be our mascots,'” Johnson says. “There was quite a while where the folks at Sega of America were very excited about our title, and they were saying, ‘Hey, we think these could be our Mario characters. At the time the company was desperate for colourful, on-brand mascots to rival Nintendo, and for a while, it looked like the duo from Funkotron might fit the bill. Voorsanger loved it, and – somewhat to the pair’s surprise – so did Sega. “I pitched him on this crazy idea of these two aliens that crash land on earth, how we’d flip things upside down and the earthlings are the bad guys that are chasing the aliens,” Johnson explains. As he tells it, Johnson’s idea for ToeJam & Earl began in rather picturesque style, relaying the game’s unusual premise to programmer Mark Voorsanger during a trek up California’s Mount Tamalpais in 1989. Offering a simultaneously co-operative two-player mode – a gaming dynamic that was almost non-existent at the time – as well as the ability to play randomly generated levels every time, ToeJam & Earl was both outrageously fun and highly replayable.īack in 1991, of course, I wasn’t to know that I’d one day be interviewing the game’s creator, Greg Johnson, via a Zoom link to his home in Hawaii for NME.
With the aid of various gift-wrapped presents that can hinder as well as help the protagonists, they attempt to escape our ridiculous planet and return to their own.įalling in love is one of the many pitfalls that the pair must face on their journey, and it was one that I succumbed to instantly as a giddy six-year-old. The 1991 game follows the story of two rap-loving aliens who crash-land on earth and begin trying to piece together their spaceship – only to find an assortment of pesky earthlings in their way. A sleeper hit by all accounts, the game went on to become a resounding cult classic that spawned a string of sequels, each one an ambitious attempt at replicating the original’s charm. If none of this is filling you with nostalgia, perhaps you missed out on the gonzo pleasures of ToeJam & Earl, this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of its release on the Sega Megadrive.
TOEJAM AND EARL TORRENT
You scramble to check for presents that might help but, having already randomized twice, you’re as likely to unleash a torrent of tomato rain as a life-saving boombox. One minute you’re carefully sneaking up on Santa, ready to prise some super hi-tops from his jolly mitts, when all of a sudden a phantom ice cream truck announces its arrival with an almighty honk.