David Perry has made a lot of promises over the years but let’s hope his latest holds true. The former head of Shiny Entertainment and current head of Gaikai said at the Develop Conference that his most famous creation, Earthworm Jim, will get a new game sometime soon.
Back before he was the head of Sony’ newly purchased cloud-based streaming video game service Gaikai, David Perry was in the video game development business. Of those designers known for the more off the wall video games of the mid-1990s, Perry and his studio Shiny never attained the fame, success or respect by peers like Lorne Lanning and Oddworld Inhabitants. Shiny’s ambitious titles like Messiah and Wild 9 were never quite as good as the ideas behind them. All the studio’s work, and all of Perry’s games really, were overshadowed by their first: Earthworm Jim. It was the tale of lowly annelid who finds a super suit and has to save a hot bee lady from an ugly bee lady while also being kind to cows. Plenty of platformers before it were silly, but few were funny.
Perry, who programmed both Earthworm Jim and its sequel, told Eurogamer at the conference that Jim will be back sooner rather than later.
“Our problem is that the team is all doing well in whatever they’re doing right now,” said Perry, “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 the all want to do. We have our own little discussion group on Facebook. We’ve been having this discussion: When will [Earthworm Jim] happen? When could we do it? What would make sense?”
“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.”
What will a new Earthworm Jim look like? “The thing we had talked about in the past is Jim had been in retirement. 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.”
That sounds like a pretty fantastic set up for Earthworm Jim 3.
