“They felt that a side-scrolling game with large characters and more action would be better understood and received by their market,” Johnson recalled. The weird positioning of ToeJam and Earl led to low sales, moving Johnson and Voorsanger to the awkward spot where Sega asked them to scrap their initial ideas of a sequel. If we had stayed with the original style, I suspect we probably would have kept building on it for years, just as Diablo did.”Īlas, that’s not how it went. “I think if we had taken the approach that Diablo took a few years later, and kept with the dungeon theme with weapons, potions, scrolls, and monsters and treasure we would have had more success, even as a roguelike. Johnson offers an alternate route for how ToeJam and Earl might have found more success with its idea initially. The colorful aesthetic might have appealed to a certain gamer back in the 1991, but the roguelike mechanics might not have been similarly appealing to that gamer.

It wasn’t your typical console game in the ‘90s, even more so as it came out about a month after the Super Nintendo launched. While Sega of America was taken by Johnson and his ‘90s cohort Mark Voorsanger’s pitch for the original Rogue-inspired ToeJam and Earl adventure, most other people back in the day unfortunately weren’t. “Randomly generated levels is part of what makes a roguelike game work, because part of the excitement and mystery that make the game so compelling is seeing ‘how far you can get.’” Rogue directly inspired ToeJam and Earl, partially because of how taken Johnson was of the inspiration.

It really captured my imagination in a way that no game before it had.” His obsession with the PC game might have overtook his studies, as he recalled: “There were many, many nights when I should have been sleeping or studying, but instead I was sitting all night in a small computer terminal room playing Rogue in ASCII characters on a black and white CRT monitor. Johnson’s interest in Rogue - the progenitor of an entire gaming genre - dates back to his time in college at the University of California San Diego in the late ‘80s. How did a concept that was foreign in the ‘90s become so well-worn in the 2010s? Well, we can’t answer that, but we can hit up HumaNature’s Greg Johnson - the man behind ToeJam and Earl’s modern revival as well as one of the two men behind its initial blast of Sega Genesis irreverence.

But in 1991, ToeJam and Earl was aggressively ahead of its time, bringing roguelike concepts to consoles decades before they were in vogue. In 2019, ToeJam and Earl: Back in the Groove could be dismissively saddled by being just another roguelike in the sea of modern gaming.

Greg johnson mark voorsanger