Gadgetory

my name is Greg Johnson and I am an independent game developer I run human nature studios and we are making a new version a reboot a new game is called toejam and Earl back in the room that it's a very sort of chill game much slower paced and a lot of games are it's got a lot of memories for people this time we're gonna do a true reboot of game toejam and earl was originally released in 1991 second game came out in 93 that was called panic on funkotron the original game came out for the Sega Genesis sort of a byproduct of my background I think I grew up in the 70s with a lot of funk music I know I don't really look it now I'm half half white half black that's what I look like in 1977 that's that's me with the fro so toejam and Earl are african-american characters yo what's up my name is toejam you know it's my homeboy big Earl you stay what's up Earl you were so that was just kind of came out because that was my world I made the game with my business partner mark force anger co-creator it was just the two of us we had this idea that we were gonna do a dynamic split-screen when two players walked a part of the screen would split and then they come together again and it comes back together and we mentioned that to Sega they said mmm flowery there's no way the hardware's gonna do that just can't do it thankfully mark is a little bit stubborn and actually managed to make it happen see a whole pile of original artwork here this is some of the very original art like this is one of the first drawings ever of toejam we did a turnaround you got to do that of course when you're designing a character from all angles and these were like really really early sketches Wow that goes way back the new game is kind of a mix of game 1 elements and gain 2 elements and then a bunch of new things to that we've brought in so it feels old but it's just better we ran Kickstarter campaign I think our bar was 400 K we came in at 500 a little bit over we added a bunch of new characters in this game there's now 9 playable characters instead of 2 you can play toejam and Earl in their new forms and in their classic forms we have the rhythm matching that was in Game one now you can create your own beat and and that's particularly fun when you're playing with other people because then they have to match the beat that you've created you know I wasn't going to do the voices for this game initially and then we started getting feedback from some of the fans on the forum a lot of them said no no no we want the original voice we want to hear it again the insane dentist I had to do that one when everyone else left the office had a cackle that went like the music is exactly the same it is like very very pure old-school funk we're gonna be out on PC and on consoles I just want people to love it in this case I want people to feel like we did justice to their memories to feel like it really is true to the spirit of the original games if people feel like we did that like we succeeded at making them feel those joyful memories again then I'll feel like we did