ToeJam & Earl

In October 1991, Sega published ToeJam & Earl on the Genesis, designed by Greg Johnson and programmed by Mark Voorsanger of Johnson Voorsanger Productions. The premise was gloriously strange: two alien rappers crash-land on Earth after Earl's catastrophic piloting, and have to wander a hostile-but-goofy planet collecting the ten scattered pieces of their wrecked spacecraft. The planet was out to get them; the vibe stayed chill anyway — and that tension is basically the whole game.

Under the funk, the design was quietly radical for a console game. It borrowed its foundation from Rogue, the 1980 dungeon-crawler: every playthrough generated a fresh stack of randomly assembled floating islands, so no two games were alike. Wrapped presents littered the world, their contents — good or catastrophic — a mystery until you opened one. Combat was largely non-violent (you threw tomatoes), and the two-player co-op pulled its best trick when the split screen merged back into a single shared screen whenever the players stood together, then split again as you wandered apart. Meeting up felt like something.

At first, almost nobody bought it. But the Genesis's Christmas 1991 surge and steady word-of-mouth turned the flop into a cult hit that eventually sold about 350,000 copies. The 1993 sequel, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, became a conventional side-scrolling platformer after Sega rejected an original-style concept — fans mostly wished it hadn't. The original remains the keeper: a game that shouldn't cohere — funk aliens, mystery gifts, tomato combat — and somehow lands in perfect balance.