Retrospective: ToeJam & Earl

Some, like the minxy hula girls who freeze you to the spot with their wriggly dances, come with specific dangers you have to avoid, but plenty of them just seem to represent invention for invention's sake: an exaggerated but oddly recognisable slice of early nineties existance.

All of them, of course, like ToeJam and Earl themselves, are brought to life by the extra animations that the shift from 8-bit to 16-bit consoles allowed for. As such, SEGA's offering is a riot of details, from ToeJam's hands-together dive into waters, to Earl's belly-swaying walk or the elastic screeching of that awful ice cream truck as it blasts out of nowhere to run you over.

On the surface, these little flights of fancy seem surplus to the requirements of this simple game about wandering around and levelling up, but in reality they're one of the things that really define it. You dive back into ToeJam & Earl's randomised levels not just because you want to see how far you'll get this time, but to meet new people along the way, and enjoy the strange, imaginative means they'll find of killing you.

It's not just the characters that make ToeJam & Earl a spectacular videogame, of course. Most of my memories of playing the game revolve around other delights: opening up one of the random presents and finding myself blasted around the level on rocket skates or lulled to sleep by a textbook (dressing items up as Christmas presents is such a fabulous idea for loot, incidentally, as it encourages you to use your inventory in greedy bursts rather than just horde it), squabbling with my sister after one of us had accidentally knocked the other back down three screens, or reliving the first, wonderful time I discovered Level Zero and its hot tub: a rare piece of playground videogame mythology that turned out to actually be true.

Level Zero is far more than just an Easter egg, too. I think it's genuinely emblematic of what's great about ToeJam & Earl. Sure, you can't really do much when you're there except hang out with hula girls and drink lemonade, but you'll find yourself doing this all the same because the game has made the world and the characters seem so real. It's an environment in which just hanging out becomes a viable playing mechanic. How many games can you say that about?

I see now that the real success of ToeJam & Earl comes down to a question of influences. It may have been built around Rogue like so many other titles before and since, but its peculiar genius is that it didn't opt to augment that structure by sounding out Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars as visual and environmental cues. Instead, Johnson and Voorsanger opted for a mixture of Kid 'n' Play, Bill & Ted, and The Simpsons.

We often complain about the limited, repetitive ideas spewed out by even the best big-budget releases, so it's wonderful to have this accidental alien invasion to remind you that, while it's always nice to see graphics, physics, and AI getting better, wouldn't it be lovely if gaming's thematic gene pool expanded at the same rate? It's a small thing to ask, surely, and yet look how much it will give you: games about buddies, games about high-fives, and games, of course, about rocket skates.