Collection essentials #142: ToeJam & Earl (Genesis)

Here’s a very unusual game from early in the Sega Genesis lifespan that wound up with a strong following. You play as the two characters named in the game’s title, ToeJam (the red one) and Earl (the one with shades). They’re aliens who were cruising around space for the fun of it. ToeJam is the pilot, but Earl wanted to try his hand at flying the ship on a whim during this little trip. Well…it didn’t go too well. They crash landed on the strange foreign planet Earth and their ship shattered into a bunch of pieces! Never let Earl drive. The object of the game is to explore Earth and gather all the pieces of the ship. I guess this alien ship comes apart like LEGOs or something, maybe it’s built to separate so it can still function when reassembled!

This game takes place from a top-down perspective, with the player(s) free to move ToeJam and/or Earl in all four directions. As you start the game, you seem to be on an island in the middle of a vast body of water, and there’s an…elevator nearby? Not attached to a building? Yeah. You go into the elevator, and then you soon see how strange this game is. The levels in this game are a series of “floors”, only you’re not inside a building, they’re large floating patches of ground. Upon reaching a floor, you’ll get notified if there’s a ship piece to find somewhere on it. Otherwise, you want to find the elevator on that floor to get to the next one, and you may want to stick around a while to gather resources. The main resource of this game are presents, which each do something unique, positive or negative. These range from giving you wings, letting you throw tomatoes, making you burp a whole bunch, to even outright killing you, and much more. The trick is that, when you start a new game, you don’t know what any of the presents are when you first pick them up. Once you use a present, then you’ll know what type of present is for the rest of the run, or you can also pay a certain character you’ll meet who will identify a present for you without using it up. 

What stands in your way? Earthlings, of course. There are a variety of wacky Earth creatures who will try to thwart you in various ways. Many of these are humans, such as a crazy dentist, a guy mowing the lawn who doesn’t care if you’re in the way, and a hula dancer who you can’t help but dance with for a second even if a more dangerous enemy is hot on your tail. Some aren’t humans, like a giant hamster rolling around in a ball, and some aren’t even from real life such as the boogie men who turn invisible and try to sneak up on you. Take enough damage and you will die, and running out of lives means a game over. There’s no natural way for ToeJam & Earl to defend themselves; they need a present power-up of some kind to fight back, or they can just run away. If you fall off of a level, you actually WON’T die, and instead fall to the previous level, and you’ll have to walk back to the elevator again to get back to where you were.

ToeJam & Earl is a game that is really meant to be played with two players. With a friend, you can split up to explore a level much quicker. There is an advantage to sticking together too, because when you’re close, any presents used will be applied to both players instead of just one. When playing single-player, the game just moves too slow and can really feel like a drag. 

ToeJam & Earl can be considered an example of a “Roguelike” game, and it was the first such game that I ever played. What’s a Roguelike? In 1980 there was a game called Rogue that saw the player go through randomly-generated dungeons, grabbing items to use along the way to help survive, only the player doesn’t know what an item does right away before using it. With everything being so randomized, this created the appeal of the game giving you a somewhat different experience every time you played. ToeJam & Earl took direct inspiration from Rogue and has a “random world” option that completely randomizes all the levels and ship piece locations! Although there’s also a “fixed world” with the same levels each time for those who want a more consistent experience. “Roguelike” would come to be a very popular genre among independent game developers a couple decades after ToeJam & Earl came out, and it’s a genre I’m quite fond of, so I’ll eventually get around to talking about some of them, but that’s quite a ways down the road.

As a kid, I was actually introduced to this series via the sequel (stay tuned) which is a completely different type of game, and didn’t even know this original one existed until I was a teenager. It took me some time to warm up to it, but I eventually came to appreciate this game too. It’s one I’ve actually played this year a couple times already with friends. It’s a unique, quirky, fun experience, a Genesis essential.