Interview with Greg Johnson, Co. Creator of Toejam & Earl

In this post TigerMacZ & William Trelane join Greg Johnson for a Q&A session regarding ToeJam and Earl Back in the Groove and some other equally interesting things.

The Following abbreviations will be used.
WT: William Trelane, TM: TigerMacZ and GJ: Greg Johnson.

WT: How was the working relationship between the old studio when they were working with Sega as a publisher compared to now that the game is self-published?

GJ: In both cases our relationship with Sega has been great.  For the original games they were our publisher and they were very easy to work with.  In those days we worked almost exclusively with SOA (Sega of America).  These days it is SOJ (Sega of Japan) who we deal with because they often approach us to license the original games.  Or to license our characters for use in some other SOJ game.  I recently went to Japan and visited with a couple of the teams at SOJ and it was a great time.  They are very nice people, and very gracious to deal with.  Self-publishing has been quite a challenge but that is a whole different story.  Oddly, self-publishing has given us a deeper appreciation for what good publishers bring to the table.  Publishing is a lot of work!

TM: How did Cody Wright get involved with the project?

GJ: Cody Wright called me up one day to let me know that he had seen our KickStarter campaign and that he was a big ToeJam and Earl fan.  He offered to play music for our new game and even to do it for free and to fly out from the east coast to do it.  I didn’t know who Cody Wright was at the time, so I thanked him politely and almost forgot about it.  Then a few days later I decided to look him up on YouTube and I realized that I had just been given an offer by one of the greatest young musicians of our time.  Seriously, this guy was every bit as good as Jaco Pastorius, you know the amazing Bassist from Weather Report who does Birdland?  I was floored.  So I called Cody back and said… um… “hey is that offer still open”?  Cody said “Of course!”  He mentioned that he had started playing the bass because of ToeJam and Earl and he wanted to pay it back.  He knew all, and I mean all of the old ToeJam and Earl songs by heart.  What an amazing experience it was working with him, and now we are the best of friends.

WT: During Back in the Groove there seems to be some cross over with the game Super Indie Karts, where ToeJam and Earl are racers and there is a ToeJam and Earl level to race on, how did that come about?

GJ: When we were contacted by One-Legged Seagull, the creator of Super Indie Karts, we thought it might be a fun way to gain some extra exposure and also help support a fellow KickStarted Indie developer.  We were surprised when we saw the product.  We didn’t expect them to do such a good job!

TM: There must have been times during production where you had several obstacles, originally being for pc, then spreading out onto consoles, also publisher issues where Adult Swim Games were going to be publishing before switching back to self-publishing. How was that? But I guess everything pales in comparison to the unfortunate passing of Greg Brown, the voice Earl.

GJ: Yes, all very true.  Game development is always a rocky road, but having such a beloved person pass away unexpectedly like that is… well of course in a class by itself.  Greg Brown, who was the voice of Big Earl, was an unusually kind-hearted and positive man.  He left behind many who will miss him deeply, and I for one am saddened because he won’t ever get to see how much joy people will get from his voice work and his singing in Back in the Groove.  As to the other issues…  networking and optimizing for consoles were probably our two biggest technical problems, and these two things ended up pushing our schedule back by quite a bit.  In the end though, this also gave us more time for bug fixing and polishing, so I think we will have a better game for it.

TM: I know that award-winning educational titles were developed back in the day, so how does that compare to making a game which is perceived as more for entertainment? Would HumaNature studios make an educational title in the future?

GJ: Ah…  You probably are referring to Orly’s Draw-A-Story.  Although Doki Doki Universe certainly had an educational component as well.  In any event the answer is of course.  I and the others at HumaNature Studios would love to do more titles that are educational in one way or another.  The very best educational titles are just as fun and engaging as any pure entertainment title, so this distinction between the two is probably not all that meaningful anyway.  

WT: I heard that there's a new game not yet announced called Neighbourhood Watch, will there be any information forthcoming in the near future about it?

GJ: I’m sure we will have more info on that down the road.  Our first order of business is of course to get Back in the Groove done and out the door.  We may find that after we release, we will continue to work on BitG if it generates enough revenue to allow for this.  There are a number of other languages we would like to port it to, for example, and some console features we’d love to add, with more optimizing.  We will see.  First things first, eh?

@TigerMacZ and William Trelane.