Alright, Retro Roulette wheel – I fully forgive you for giving me Atari Pac-Man a few months ago.
As a child growing up in the mid-90s, I was blessed with a surprising amount of pop culture that was both aimed at kids and just…really, really weird. We had Ren & Stimpy and Freakazoid! on TV, that Martin Short movie Clifford, and Earthworm Jim in our 16-bit consoles. It was a wonderfully bizarre time, and it really went a long way to shape who I am as a person.
Earthworm Jim began with the toy company Playmates, who was making a ton of money making licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuff, but wanted a whole new multimedia franchise of their own. They (along with developer Shiny Entertainment) chose to introduce their new star character in a video game, and they somehow ended up with Earthworm Jim, a regular old worm who gains superpowers after crawling into a space suit that fell from the sky. I spend seriously far too much time thinking about how someone came up with stuff like this.
If you’re unfamiliar with what the game is more generally like, it’s essentially a 2D run-and-gun adventure, albeit with a number of odd twists. In addition to a gun, Jim can use his ‘head’ (which is really his entire body) as a whip, both as a weapon and as a tool for swinging from hooks. Jim can find a one-off “plasma” upgrade for his gun, which is generally strong enough to take out a particular enemy (though if you pick one up, it *will* be your next shot, so use it wisely).
One of the first things you do in Earthworm Jim is use that refrigerator to launch that understandably nervous cow into the stratosphere. Why? It’s hard to say, though it eventually comes back to haunt you (spoiler alert: the princess you save ends up being crushed by that cow when it eventually comes back down during the game’s ending). Shortly after this, you do battle with a creature made of tires and a trash can, as well as a large man in a crane-like device who barfs fish. Why? Again, it’s hard to say.
The levels of Earthworm Jim are a bit all over the place, but generally they’re a lot of weird, goofy fun. A particularly memorable level, set on the planet Heck, is chock full of fire, demons, and lawyers. The weirdness really doesn’t let up.
One of the things I love the most about Earthworm Jim is its music and sound effects. The aforementioned Heck level amusingly switches back and forth between Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and cheesy elevator music. It’s hilarious, and adds so much to the experience. Jim’s ridiculous shouts when taking damage or picking up items (such as the shout of “Plasma!” when getting said upgrade) are also a huge part of what makes Earthworm Jim great. If only there were a relevant picture to sum up the…I’m just kidding, there totally is:
The game is also quite difficult – it pains me to say this, but it honestly isn’t difficult in a particularly good way. A lot of the difficulty comes from design decisions that just don’t make sense in hindsight. Certain jumps are trickier than they need to be, instant death traps pop up unexpectedly, and some enemy attacks are needlessly hard to avoid. The game has so much charm that the difficulty kind of does it a disservice – I wish the experience of exploring such a unique world wasn’t quite so frustrating.
Doug TenNapel, the guy who created Earthworm Jim, has had quite the career – he worked on the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes TV series, made numerous graphic novels, created the Nickelodeon show Catscratch, and developed the cult classic games The Neverhood and Skullmonkeys. He’s also responsible for much of the album art for the ska band Five Iron Frenzy, which is exactly the sort of random and interesting thing you come to this blog to learn.
While it hasn’t aged well in some respects, I still find Earthworm Jim to be a real delight. It’s goofy, colorful, and still a lot of fun. The series got an equally weird and good sequel in 1995, a thoroughly mediocre 3D sequel on the N64, and a Game Boy port that I shamefully know nothing about. The original game received an HD remake on modern consoles, but it was sadly pulled from circulation earlier this year. If you want an original copy, a cartridge will set you back $15-20, with a complete copy being about twice that (this is true of both the Genesis and SNES versions). There’s also a “Special Edition” for the Sega CD, which is surprisingly expensive.
Retro Roulette reaches its 30th game next week! It’s going to be a first-party NES title, but probably not one of the ones you’re thinking of. I hope to see you then!