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Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry believes that Earthworm Jim will get a new game one day. He’s just not sure when.
Perry, who’s now in charge of Gaikai, insists that any new game would return to the 2D action of the original games in the series:
“2D by definition is just a camera moving with you,” he said, speaking to Eurogamer. “The answer is, I would do 2D, but if you wanted you could play with the camera a little. But I don’t like it when you’re doing very 3D, because then your jumps become very hard to predict and then your controller starts breaking. It wouldn’t be fun.”
Don’t get too excited just yet, though. As Perry points out, the key creative players are all busy with their own jobs and projects. Obviously this includes Perry himself, who’s now working with Sony following the $380m acquisition of Gaikai.
“Our problem is that the team is all doing well in whatever they’re doing right now. It’s just a bunch of guys who all have their own thing. Everyone has their own company. So, to get them to stop what they’re doing and work on a game is very difficult, but it’s something they all want to do.”
He continued: “We have our own little discussion group on Facebook. We’ve been having this discussion: when will this happen? When could we do it? What would make sense?
“We feel the Kickstarter thing would have been fun just to see how much money could be raised out of a Kickstarter, because we would have put a lot of effort into the video, for example. It’s one of those things that, no one’s got the time right now. I’m sure it’s going to happen, I just can’t tell you exactly when.”
On the plus side, it’s clear that Perry has put some thought into how a new Earthworm Jim game might work.
“The thing we had talked about in the past is Jim had been in retirement,” he said. “So, he’s been sitting at home watching movies and eating popcorn. He’s grossly overweight now. The plan was to start with him literally getting off the sofa, and it’s a disaster because he just hasn’t done anything since. But he’s got to get back into action again.”
Meanwhile Jim’s creator, Doug TenNapel, has a different plan – though Perry doesn’t seem to be a fan:
“There’s an interesting tension between Doug and myself. When he started to draw the new Earthworm Jim, if I showed you the sketches of what he wanted the next Earthworm Jim to look like, I can guarantee you’d go, no! Don’t go that way! Because he’s going wimpy. My job I to fight him on that. No, don’t go wimpy. We don’t want wimpy.”
