Earthworm Jim 3D, Menace to the Franchise

However good the intentions for something start out, sometimes a spanner is thrown into the works. In the case of Earthworm Jim, it was a very large spanner.

Eventually the Earthworm Jim franchise seemed buried and forgotten because of a string of poor decisions.

Earthworm Jim 3D was the first nail in the coffin, followed by a mediocre Game boy outing and badly made conversions that without the skills of the original team and creator, had lost the character and charm of their predecessors.

Attempts had been made from 2002 to 2006 to revive the franchise again. Because of internal problems or disagreements they didn't work out.
Once creative control had been lost and with the licence split across several different companies, the revival of the franchise became seemingly impossible.

This is the story of how it went wrong and continued to go wrong regardless of the damage to the licence.

• Menace 2 the Franchise

Earthworm Jim 3D

Earthworm Jim 3D was set to be the third Earthworm Jim game in the series. It was planned to take Jim into the three dimensional era of games.
When it was developed three dimensional gaming was still at an awkward stage. It wasn't an easy transition to make. This was a very difficult time to make another Earthworm Jim video game, because most of the original development team who had made the first two, and who understood the EWJ-verse well enough to even attempt another sequel, had moved on in their lives since the first two games.

Different parts of the Earthworm Jim licence and rights had been sold to several different investors. The character rights which should have belonged to Doug TenNapel, were sold off to different companies. So creative control was lost by the creator. This proved to be a terrible turn for Earthworm Jim because no one understood the characters, world or what made it "work" enough to produce a quality product based on it.

Around 1998 instead of Shiny Entertainment, Vis-plc (Vis Entertainment) developed Earthworm Jim 3D which was published by Interplay.
At the very early stages in its development TenNapel and Perry had some involvement in the project. For whatever reason they ceased to work with the project, and the developers didn't use their expertise. Instead of being in the same kind of vain as the original games, EWJ 3D became a very separate entity.

Awkward Development

It was worked on for longer than it should have been. At one point, most of the development work seemed to have been thrown out completely, which caused more confusion when it finally came to be released.

The box art was produced very poorly. In complete contrast to the previous beautifully illustrated covers and polished packaging, lifeless and ugly renderings of Earthworm Jim plastered the box art, coupled with lurid day-glow colours.

Screenshots that were not accurate to the game - of levels that had been cut out of the finished game - were circulated around the internet and media. Some were even published on the final game packaging.

Many who played it took it back. It had a string of bad reviews, and proved to be very disappointing to original fans of the first two games.

The finished game was very strange...not in a good way.
Earthworm Jim 3D was about how Earthworm Jim had effectively gone insane and been incarcerated to a hospital ward after being hit on the head by a cow.

The aim of the game was to retrieve all of Jim's marbles from the different parts of his damaged psyche, in order to free him from his own mind. There were four different areas to complete named after different parts of his mind - Memory, Fear, Fantasy and Happiness. Four zones set to Barnyard, Horror, Western and Food themes.

There were a few rather eyebrow-raising things of note. Certain items that you would collect...the most annoying and stupidly disgusting of these was a special "Can of Beans" item that would propel Jim upwards with a green trail of smoke behind him. The western level had lakes of raw sewage that you would have to avoid falling into. One of the weapons (In the barnyard level) was of all things, a knife gun that horridly decapitated enemies.

To add insult to injury, the last boss you would play (aside from being exactly the same as all the other boss battles in the game) was essentially Earthworm Jim wearing a pink dress, high heels, lipstick, fake eyelashes and a blond wig.
If you bothered to bang your head against a brick wall of agony to beat "Earthworm Kim" you would be rewarded with a short movie of Jim getting crushed to death by a fridge. What on Earth were they thinking?

The levels were very large. You would think this to be a good feature, however it proved to be very tedious. This was not helped by the very awkward camera which made it extremely difficult to play.
The game was uninspired. It was loosely based on the 1995 TV Show versions of the characters. The rest was tedium. Dan Castellaneta voiced Jim. Jim said some very un-Jim-like things such as "Great Googley Woogly", and various random screams of anguish, surprise or shock.

There were a couple of other characters in there. Peter Puppy could be seen peering into Jim's eyes looking concerned at the beginning of the game...he made no other appearance. Snott was used as a type of help guide, but didn't really do anything useful. The princess wasn't present. Evil The Cat was reduced to an image on a vinyl music player somewhere in the "Fear" level, and didn't make an actual appearance. The only two bad guys from the TV Show (since it was based upon the TV Show) were Professor Monkey for-a-Head and Psy-Crow.

Several new characters had been created for the different sections of the game. They were pretty trite. Cows, a giant hamburger, Elvis, a giant gherkin, giant food in general, disco dancing zombies, horrible flying baby things, homicidal grannies, war mongering bulls, giant chicks...that kind of thing.

All of the boss fights were based on the same premise; that of the baddy riding around on the back of a pig, and bumping into you. That would make you drop all the green marbles you had spent hours collecting. If they stole enough marbles you would die. That was not a whole lot of fun.

The animation wasn't anything to speak of. Things bounced up and down or wobbled like jelly.

By the standards set by the originals, Earthworm Jim had single-handedly been turned into a second-rate franchise. By being released after so many development problems EWJ 3D had turned into a nightmare. It had too many glitches and bugs in it which coupled with the camera that would force itself into a position; the game play was far too frustrating to "put up" with. The publisher was relying on the selling potential of the license and nothing more.

Menace 2 the Franchise

In 1999/2000 a Game boy Color game was made by Crave Entertainment called Menace 2 the Galaxy. Yet another last-ditch attempt to cash in on what was a dying licence.

Based on the TV show it featured Jim at odds with "Evil Jim" a doppelganger character from the cartoon show. The strangest thing about it was that you had to go around collecting coins...something that was more akin to platform games such as the Mario series. It was a poorly made game, again stale and uninspired. It had nothing to do with what Earthworm Jim used to be. Of course it was all a bit too late by then.

In 2001 Earthworm Jim one and two were unimaginatively re-released for the Game boy Advance.

EWJ 1 was published by Majesco and developed by Game Titan. The game was in fact a direct port of the original Snes game.

The following year, they then released EWJ 2. Another Snes conversion, it was "developed" by an unknown developer called Super Empire.

The conversions were not made well. They had collision detection problems and many other glitches. It was shoddy and badly made. A last ditch attempt to squeeze money out of the remaining Earthworm Jim fan base and unsuspecting people who had missed out on the originals.

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References / Sources:

EWJ 3D for PC
Developer Sites: Vis-plc, Majesco & Game Titan.

Additional information thanks to Doug TenNapel.