Here's a bit of surrealism (or an acid flashback) for your Monday evening: the fine folks over at Bitmob have dug up a short making-of documentary for Shiny Entertainment's Earthworm Jim. Depending on your ability to tolerate everything gnarly about the 90's condensed into six minutes, it might be a little hard to watch. It's like the Chien andalou of our time.
If you can get past the quick cuts, the neon, and the bad clothes, the video (below the fold) is acutally kind of interesting. There are some tidbits about how Shiny used to pick its employees, how EWJ was animated, and the process of creating multi-platform games (which wasn't really standard back then).
While Shiny warchief David Perry mentions the "long hours" needed to make a game, the whole video is generally very positive and paints game development as some sort of collective, creative endeavor that makes you barf rainbows every morning as you enter the office. It's as much a pitch for game development as a career as much as an advertisement for EWJ. This, of course, doesn't make the video any less delightfully campy.
With EWJ on the PSP cancelled, and no new information on EWJ 4, I don't get enough chances to boast about Earthworm Jim, so I'll take this chance to shout it from the rooftops: Earthworm Jim is one of my favorite franchises of all time, and if you disagree, you'll die poor and lonely.
Joseph Leray is a founding Destructoid editor and has better hair than you. He speaks French and needs to send us his updated bio in English, preferably.
Likes
Confuse Ray, Feel My Blade
A Mabari War Hound,
Snot,
Spiral Arrow,
Argo,
Dan Smith's critical hit bark,
Rolling things up into my life
Meet the rest of the team
@ Amaru: Tom Tanaka is Pete Wanat in disguise!
@ Diverse: not anymore, it was canceled. The characters were based on a graphic novel he did called Gear, but were entirely reimagined for the show. TenNapel is currently (I think) working on a NeverHood movie.
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Contest:
6:00 PM on 06.29.2009
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I loved these games. Even had the sub-par GBA port. Fun games.
Earthworm Jim is AMAZING.
It's a great series though and it was a shame the PSP port got cancelled :(
Ahhhh wonderful decade...
@ Diverse: not anymore, it was canceled. The characters were based on a graphic novel he did called Gear, but were entirely reimagined for the show. TenNapel is currently (I think) working on a NeverHood movie.