Toejam & Earl
Hyper spooky game #9
Type of Game
Um… how should I put it? A super-funky quest? Space-rap-style wanderings with maximum coolness? Something swaggy and crazy along those lines.
Release date on our machines
November 1991, with a bit of Vanessa Williams’ “Running Back to You” playing in the background in the stores. Or maybe “Rap Tout” by Les Inconnus?
Developer
Johnson-Voorsanger Productions. Huh, is this an alien studio ?
Publisher
SEGA Enterprises Ltd. And thanks for this moment, guys.
Toejam & Earl: available on the Mega Driiiiiive Miniiiiii. YES! It used to exist on Steam and Nintendo Switch Online, but SEGA seems to have pulled the plug. What a bunch of cheapskates!
Nelson and Mortimer Paprika, the brothers next door who made me believe in the existence of partial transformations in Altered Beast, were actually really nice. They sometimes teased me, but in a good-natured way. They included me in all their activities, whether outside their house or inside a TV, even though they were five and ten years older than me. They’d show me movies I’d never have been allowed to see at my age (and no, I’m not talking about the ones you’re thinking of), and they’d introduce me to super-cool stuff like Fido Dido or Roll’up gum. Between a trip to their jungle-like backyard, which was home to a haunted cabin (I swear I’m not lying), or their equally haunted attic (I’m lying even less), where fantastic Warhammer figurines took pride of place, we always ended on a high note with a gaming session. I’d discover their new SEGA video games, while they’d inevitably pitch them to me as absolute smash hits. And I took them at their word, of course. In fact, they were almost always right. There was Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System, then Thunder Force II, Moonwalker, and Revenge of Shinobi. Then Toejam & Earl came along one day in late 1991. Among all these electronic treasures, that cartridge may have left a bigger impression on me than all the others combined. Yeah, well, maybe not all together, because there were also Dragon’s Fury and Robocop vs. the Terminator in the mix.
Aliens Are Our Neighbors
But those games didn’t come out on Earth until long after our two alien rappers, so I’m not counting them. Honestly, if I had to keep just one relic that captures the best moments I’ve shared with Nelson and Mortimer, it would be a copy of Toejam & Earl. Hey, you know what? I can go way beyond that. Toejam & Earl single-handedly captures the first half of the ’90s. The multicolored sweatpants, the ghetto blasters, the gold chains, and, uh… the “gifts” left on the floor? Yeah, why not. What if Nelson and Mortimer were Earth-bound reincarnations of Toejam & Earl? Or, what if Toejam & Earl were playing the pixelated, funky roles of my neighbors? WOW, THAT’S A TOTAL MIND BLOW!
Interstellar Messiness
Right from the start, you can tell the developers had a brainwave along the lines of: “Hey, let’s make a game where aliens crash on Earth and have to explore it to get back home.” OK! “But here’s the thing—they rap, or at least they love music a thousand times more than humans do.” NOT BAD! “And Earth—um—we’ll imagine it as layers upon layers of winding paths, all connected by an elevator.” Uh… ALRIGHT, SOLD! “And the Earthlings will be just as much humans as they are demons, giant hamsters, or carnivorous mailboxes.” Whoa, do you guys know where this is going? “Not at all, but it’s going to be awesome—we’ve still got tons of ideas.” Well, all right then. The story doesn’t say so, but I think the team at Johnson-Voorsanger greenlit the project with something like this: “It’s going to be total nonsense, absolute chaos, but people are going to have a blast! Let’s get to work, guys!” And indeed, you sometimes wonder what on earth is going on in this isometric exploration game.
We learn from a cutscene—which is definitely not set to a hip-hop beat—that Toejam & Earl, hailing from the planet Funkotron, were cruising through space when that orange mollusk idiot in sunglasses got hit in the face by a rock while doing an urban rodeo in an asteroid field. The ship crashes on Earth and shatters into ten separate pieces that you’ll have to collect. Oh yeah, an exploration-style adventure—cool. Meanwhile, the worst scum walking the surface of our beautiful blue planet are trying to blow our heads off. So there’s a good dose of survival in the gameplay, too. I said we sometimes wonder what’s going on here, but no—we’re constantly asking ourselves that question. Why an elevator? Why this super-weird level design made up of winding paths suspended in the void of space? Why chickens armed with tomato cannons? Why Tahitian dancers? Why is the game so scary that it makes us laugh until our sides hurt?
So many questions to which I haven’t necessarily found answers. And that’s OK. More than OK, actually. I just loved it, honestly. This game gave new meaning to the word “journey.” Yeah, maybe when I was six or seven, I didn’t even know the word “journey.” It doesn’t matter. Thanks to Toejam & Earl, I discovered that there was more to gaming than just platformers, beat ’em ups, and shoot ’em ups. The more time passes, the harder it gets for me to express myself using all those outdated terms. I also discovered that you could turn on the console just to enjoy yourself, without feeling like you’d accomplished anything. Toejam & Earl almost pushes gameplay into the background, focusing instead on injecting pure fun into our veins. And when gameplay is relegated to a minor role, that means controls that are hard to master, level design that’s both simplistic and messy, and mechanics that are more or less broken.
But when our character—with that ridiculous face—throws tomatoes at a little cupid fluttering about until he disappears with a little “pop” worthy of the most beautiful soap bubbles, well, we’re having fun, yeah. We’ve lost three-quarters of our health bar without knowing why, we’ve lost track of where we are in the level, but we’re having fun. Once you get past the first few minutes of gameplay, it’s still just as obvious that the developers were taking a completely free-wheeling approach to design: “Hey, let’s also scatter gifts all over the ground, but some of them will be traps. And players will have to memorize the pattern of each item to know which ones will give them a useful bonus and which won’t. And we’ll make the aliens say random stuff to make them super cool. And they’ll be able to swim, too, and visit a secret level with a lemonade vendor and Hawaiian girls in a hot tub. We said Tahitian girls earlier—oh well, never mind. HAHAHAHA WE’RE SO FUNNY!”Mais quand notre personnage et sa trogne improbable balance des tomates sur un petit cupidon voletant jusqu’à le faire disparaître dans un petit “pop” digne des plus belles bulles de savon, bah on s'amuse, ouais. On a perdu trois quarts de notre barre de vie sans savoir pourquoi, on ne sait plus où on se trouve dans la niveau, mais on s'amuse. Passées les premières minutes de jeu, on sent toujours autant que les développeureuses pratiquaient la conception de projet en roule libre totale : “Tiens, on va aussi foutre des cadeaux partout par terre, mais certains seront piégés. Et les joueurs devront retenir le motif de chaque item par cœur pour savoir lequel lui filera un bonus intéressant ou pas. Et on va faire dire n’imp aux extraterrestres pour les rendre ultra cool. Et ils pourront nager aussi, et visiter un niveau secret avec un vendeur de limonade et des hawaïennes dans un jacuzzi. On a dit tahitiennes tout à l’heure, allez pas grave. HAHAHAHA QU'EST-CE QU'ON EST MARRANTS !”
Yeah, yeah, you guys are funny, but can you stop messing up your game at some point, huh? The universe really doesn’t make any sense. It takes place on Earth, but the levels—stacked one on top of the other—appear as nearly empty mazes, floating in the middle of space and filled with all kinds of stuff, not just humans. A flying elevator blasting hip-hop beats lets us reach the next level. Except… since this elevator thinks it’s so clever, it hides all over the place in each stage. And sometimes, it can take a very, very long time to find it, especially if it’s in an area you first have to unlock by… um, making a section of the level appear by walking around a bit at random. Ah, I’m going to repeat myself, but the levels are about 75% empty space. It’s not too hard to fall into it—almost always because of the clunky controls and our avatar’s hitbox, which seems to triple in size depending on the animations it’s performing.
Falling takes us back to the previous level. And now we have to trek who knows how many kilometers just to find the elevator. Stupid elevator, cheap freightlift! You don’t even have real synonyms! But actually, I’m bashing the game right now! What’s getting into me? I mean, sure, all these problems exist. So what? Who cares about any of that, as long as the rest of it makes us want to break out our boombox and shake it like we’re MC Hammer or the guys from Technotronic! Well, back then, I didn’t care, and I was already messing up the imperfect tense with every verb. I loved that little thrill when I opened a present without knowing if it would do me more harm than good! I was over the moon when my little avatar would sprint off in magical sneakers. I’d burst out laughing when the bouncing springs sent us flying all over the place—mostly right into the fork of a chubby, red-faced demon. And I was scared out of my wits by half the enemies in this game. People from my own planet? Yeah, right—what a great life lesson from some aliens!
Be wary of your fellow humans—absolutely! Starting with the wizards I avoided like the plague—those creepy guys with their leering stares. Well, actually, they were just selling us stuff without hurting anyone, so… All this to say that Toejam & Earl taught me quite a bit about our civilization, its flaws and its good sides. More than a good half of my teachers, more than plenty of my classmates too, and… come on, let’s be brutally honest, more than my own mother. At least when it comes to the positive aspects of life. For example, thanks to this game, if I hear music I like, I drop whatever I’m doing and dance. And if I spot a mailbox in the distance, I stay as far away from it as possible, because you could see it as a metaphor for a nasty child molester. But more seriously, this game taught us: first, that the human race is full of total nutcases; and second, that it’s better to approach life with as much lightheartedness and self-deprecation as possible, if you don’t want to plunge into an abyss of depression. Huh? What? Nah, nothing. I don’t know, it just makes sense to me all of a sudden. Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow—we’ll see.
The best sounds of the universe
From the very first minutes of gameplay, you can tell the developers were thinking, “Hey! Let’s come up with some crazy stuff that has nothing to do with any…” Okay, I’ll stop—I’m getting myself all upset. Especially since it’s actually the exact opposite. It seems like everything—the graphics, the gameplay… everything—is just a wrapper designed to showcase the music. That would explain the oddities and the poorly put-together elements that dot the game from start to finish. Some power-ups, instead of giving you weapons or useful gadgets, make a boom box appear that makes everyone on screen dance… and that’s it. Seriously, how cool is that? You end up spending more time enjoying the hip-hop and funk tunes than actually trying to finish the game. Well, yeah—what are we going to listen to once Toejam & Earl have left Earth and taken their sound system with them? Nothing at all, and that makes me really sad. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED this soundtrack, the brainchild of two guys who are undoubtedly a little off their rocker. Mark Miller and John Baker, who both started their careers with Toejam & Earl, before moving on to Panic in Funkotron, Robocop vs. the Terminator, Earthworm Jim, and Blood Omen, among others. We were warned right from the intro, though. The characters live only to rock out to some heavy beats as they travel through space! What could be cooler than that? Nothing at all! Every track puts us in such a great mood that nothing can dampen it for the next three days. Flawless rhythms, cosmic basslines, exhilarating melodies. The Mega Drive has rarely sounded this cool. I can only fault Mark and John for one thing: that they only wrote six different tracks, rather than one specific track for each level. What a crazy album that would have been. I never finished Toejam & Earl as a kid, but it doesn’t matter: just playing it for ten minutes (or rather, listening to it) was enough to get me pumped up for the whole day.
Bogeyman and Bunk Bed
While I spent a lot of time exploring those totally crazy mazes all by myself—creating fantastic gaming memories as an introverted kid—I also played a lot with Elena. And among the best of those fantastic memories are all those wild late-night sessions in our bedroom. I’d be lying on my bed, and the console was set up against the opposite wall of the room. I really wonder how that was physically possible, given how short the controller cables were and the distance between my mattress and the TV. My older sister slept there too, in the top bunk of the bed above mine, which makes the possibility of her playing from her spot even more improbable. We loved playing Sonic in that setup, but we also loved trying to beat a few levels on Toejam & Earl, with the screen splitting down the middle whenever one of the characters moved away from the other. The whole thing got even more chaotic—but also even more fun. If, by some misfortune, one of us fell back to the previous level, or the other got on the elevator alone, we’d be waiting a long, long time. And then, the character of the one who was waiting would eventually fall asleep. The other person would then have to wake him up by yelling at him. Just one more detail that adds an unlikely charm to this incredible game. Besides, teaming up with Elena gave me the courage to face certain enemies—enemies as relentless as they were terrifying. Well, I’d usually run away from them, screaming in terror, rather than confronting them, but it was still more bearable with two of us. Among them was the invisible ghost that would appear behind us, screaming “bogey bogey bogey.” That bastard still makes me jump awake at night, like a mutagen-enhanced version of Death in Gauntlet II. My room has gone through every possible layout over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever loved it as much as when it was set up like that. Playing the Mega Drive while sitting in bed, without having to get up when it’s time to sleep—well, that’s just too good to be true. Except when you realize you still have to go turn off the console, and that task always fell to me, since I had the bottom bunk and was three years younger. Yeah, it’s way more convenient now with a phone or a Switch 2, I’ll admit. Still, I’d love so much to see that bedroom again—frozen in time—at least once, on a night back in 1991 or 1992, with a game of Toejam & Earl playing on the TV.
Even though I said some bad things about it earlier, this game gave my childhood an indescribably cool vibe. A mix of Milky Way spread, Raiders, Salt-n-Peppa, three-franc-fifty baguettes, and Garbage Pail Kids stickers. The early ’90s, man. It’s just so awesome. When I fired up this cartridge on an emulator back in the 2010s, I screamed in exasperation several times before finally dodging twenty rabid ice cream trucks, twelve moms yelling at their kids in shopping carts, braving deadly tornadoes, escaping those infamous demonic mailboxes, and even worse... to collect all the pieces of our ship and leave this planet full of total lunatics. It was a struggle, but I made it. And it felt really good. I listened to “Finally” by CeCe Peniston while eating a Twix—just because it’s not called a Raider anymore; all I needed was an LC Waikiki cap, and I almost felt like I was back in 1991.
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