Development
Playmates Toys, finding success with the license for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, wanted to start their own franchise. Inspired by the success of the Sonic the Hedgehog series with Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, they decided that they wanted to start the franchise as a video game, a rare approach at the time. From there, the game's design actually started with Doug TenNapel's simple sketch of an earthworm that he presented to Shiny Entertainment. Impressed, David Perry and the rest of Shiny bought the rights to Earthworm Jim from TenNapel, and started developing the game. From there, TenNapel would work on doing the game design, creating level ideas, and voicing Jim's character, while Perry and the other programmers created other characters and game mechanics.
The game's crazy atmosphere, world, and characters was due to the fact that the company had previously always been restricted to doing licensed games, like 7up's Cool Spot, where they had to conform to the other company's preset limitations. In that respect, the game was actually created as a satire of platform video games at the time; for instance, "Princess-What's-Her-Name" was a parody of how so many video games had throw-away female characters to be saved.
Read more about this topic: Earthworm Jim
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Good schools are schools for the development of the whole child. They seek to help children develop to their maximum their social powers and their intellectual powers, their emotional capacities, their physical powers.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)