You need to play Jumpman immediately. Either a deconstruction of ancient platform tropes or a literal interpretation of Atari game worlds, designer Andrew McClure has described the idea behind Jumpman as what would happen if the camera in an Atari game was pulled back four feet. The result is a stark, grueling, and visually dazzling perversion of ancient game aesthetics. That it’s fun and impossibly clever is a nice bonus.
McClure’s game design reflects his personality: constantly inquisitive and subtly witty. He was kind enough to give me a few moments of his time and discuss inspiration, Bokosuka nightmares, and Jumpman on the iPhone.
THM: So Jumpman is what would happen if the camera in old video games was moved back four feet. Can you expand on that?
McClure: These really old video games are really similar because they all have similar technical limitations. There are these single screens that you look at one at a time because the C64, or whatever, couldn’t scroll very well. The thought was to say, “What if we look at the world that seems to be happening? What if we’re not looking at a representation of a construction site—or whatever the manual claims we are—but what we see is really what we’re looking at?”
One way to put it is taking those games face value. So it’s not just that Jumpman is badly drawn, but he’s actually made of big orange blocks. If you think of those worlds as being a little more realistic, if you try to think about little pocket universes that actually look like what these old video games seem to, you try to think, “What are some of the things that you would see?”
Part of that was that there were these little one-screen levels floating out in space next to each other. Which, logically, they would have to be.
You have a tendency to deconstruct video games like that. You do the same thing on your blog, like analyzing the physics behind Mario Galaxy.
Video games give you a chance to create a fake little world. The thing about taking the camera back four feet—if you try to take these worlds seriously—they are all sort of ridiculous in some way or another. If you try thinking them out too much things get humorous quickly.
Alan Moore does this kind of thing in some of his books, like Watchmen. He takes his art form—comics—and takes all of the preconceptions of this art form at face value. I’m going to take all the little weird things in the premise and say, “Okay, I accept these things,” but then I’m going to say, “here’s what happens when you see these weird things happen in a real setting.”
Is Jumpman a commentary on its own medium like Watchmen was?
Maybe. I don’t think I did anything even remotely that deep. Actually, when I was first starting to do Jumpman I had this idea that there would be this plot with this video game character that was sick of his video game and wanted to get out because he just kept getting killed over and over again. There was an web comic called Kid Radd that had a plot similar to that. I ultimately didn’t really have a plot in Jumpman at all. The plot is “guide Jumpman to the exit.”
I was sort of trying to do a deconstruction of Jumpman, or trying to explode the genre in that sort of way, but I’m not sure there’s a commentary there. It just plays off the stereotype of the art, or the stereotypes of how these games are constructed.
What were the games that informed you the most?
The games that are the most important to me are the games that are telling stories by letting it happen to you. Games like ICO, or Super Metroid, or the Abe’s Odyssey games.
It’s interesting that gaming can become a story telling medium unto itself. It’s possible for games to tell a story just by popping up text screens and telling you what’s happening, or showing a cut scene, but there is also this sort of interesting thing where games are able to present an experience and have that be an equivalent for a story. Lately I’ve been interested by this creative burst of little indie creative freeware games.
One thing that directly influenced Jumpman was Passage by Jason Rohrer. I played it and I was really impacted, but what I wound up doing was taking apart the game’s executable. I realized all the art and everything was just random .tga files. I realized, “Whoa, this stuff looks easier than I thought.”
I think Jason Rohrer would agree with you about those ideas, too. Are you planning another game yet?
I’m a little bit leery to talk about anything specific because if I decide not to, it would make me feel silly. While making Jumpman I did wind up with some fun ideas I want to explore. At first this Apple II aesthetic was to make developing the game easier. The defining characteristic of all those really old 1981 games was that the graphics looked like they were made in 10 minutes by the programmer, because they actually were. I’d like to explore that approach to the artwork a little bit more.
And I’m going to attempt to make a version of Jumpman for the iPhone. That’s one thing I’m hoping to get finished. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make some more games over the next year or two.
I remember reading interviews with old arcade game designers about how sitting in a dark room all day programming Missile Command would lead to vivid, apocalyptic nightmares. I thought Jumpman would be the type of game to lend itself to something like that—it’s so dark and claustrophobic.
I do have this friend named Joe [Joe Mathlete, member of Houston band The Mathletes] that recorded the song in the YouTube video that Jumpman is being promoted with. He used to have nightmares as a kid that were a lot like those old video games where you’re in these dark corridors with glowing things coming at you.
At one point I dug up this horrible old ROM called Bokosuka Wars. It’s sort of a mess and it’s mostly interesting because it’s funny to watch a game trying to convey something to you and fail utterly, and I showed him this game because I thought it was funny. He freaked out because it was the nightmare he used to have. I do think there is something distantly nightmarish about the Jumpman art style. That’s what those games were like.
And the ending is such a brilliant contrast to that, because it’s so beautiful and blue and pastoral.
It’s a game that very aggressively has no plot whatsoever. But I think it’s fun to look at what’s happening and ask “what is happening and what is the story?”. The thought of the ending is, well, Jumpman in this nightmarish series of corridors trying to get out being menaced by weird green spiky things and eventually you get out to this point and he gets out into “somewhere else”. It’s not clear where he is exactly but it seems to be something more real instead of blocky Apple II land where he was before. There are birds and the birds look like birds and not evil tape decks. There are trees and the blue sky—everything still looks blocky and ancient, but it seems less menacing.
It’s really not clear what happens at the end. Or even if anything really happens at the end, and you’re just playing a game from 1981 and the ending is: Jumpman is on a hill sitting under a tree.
For downloadable Jumpman content and ruminations on quantum physics and video games, check out McClure’s blog, Mechanically Separated Meat.
