ToeJam & Earl Productions

» see toejamandearl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mark Voorsanger and Greg Johnson both came out of Electronic Arts, and in 1989 they started a company named after themselves: Johnson Voorsanger Productions, credited on screen as JVP. Two years later they shipped a game about a pair of crash-landed aliens, and it did well enough that the company took the aliens' names instead. ToeJam & Earl Productions, Inc. then disbanded in 2003, when the third game in that series did not sell.

The first one landed in 1991 on the Sega Genesis, sold as the Mega Drive everywhere outside North America. My own modem was still seven years away and I never owned that console. The game was also built out of a very particular American register, funk records and street slang, and that is the layer of a joke that does not travel. I came to the series the way most people outside its window did, as a thing other people were nostalgic about on forums years later.

The third game is what ended the company. ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth reached North America on 22 October 2002 and Europe on 7 March 2003, Xbox only, co-developed with Visual Concepts and published by Sega. Reviews were mixed and sales were poor. Getting even that far had taken most of a decade: a third game had been blocked for years by disagreement between the studio and Sega, a Nintendo 64 version was abandoned, and the Dreamcast version that followed it was the build eventually finished for the Xbox instead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the two games that worked ~

The original ToeJam & Earl put two aliens on a stack of randomly generated floating islands and asked them to find the pieces of their ship. Two players shared a screen that split when they walked apart and rejoined when they walked back together, which was a nicer idea than most of what the hardware was doing in 1991. Procedurally built levels on a console cartridge in 1991 were unusual enough that people kept rediscovering the game for decades.

Panic on Funkotron in 1993 was not another run at that design, it was a side-scrolling platformer, and the randomization went with it. The catalog also holds two items nobody lists: Ready-Aim-Tomatoes, a mini-game built for Sega's Menacer light gun, and Orly's Draw-A-Story, a 1996 Broderbund CD-ROM for children aged five to ten, in which the child's own drawings became part of the animated story.

~ what greg johnson did next ~

Voorsanger stayed on as a producer at Electronic Arts for a while, then left games altogether to run a coaching business out of the same building the studio had occupied. Johnson kept consulting on design and then founded HumaNature Studios, which built Kung Fu Panda World for DreamWorks Animation. In 2015 he took the aliens to Kickstarter himself, and ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove! shipped on 1 March 2019, twenty-eight years after the first one and sixteen after the company folded.

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