Thankfulness for 11/20.

In my previous day of thankfulness, I had mentioned Al Lowe, who worked at Sierra Online and developed and wrote games like Leisure Suit Larry, Torin’s Passage, Freddy Pharkas, among others! Well, today I am going to hand out another note of thankfulness to a game designer who helped shape (or perhaps funkafy) my strange sense of humor. Today I am thankful for Greg Johnson. Off hand, most people would probably not immediately recognize his name – because he never put his name out there really as someone who worked on one of the greatest, funnest games, ever.

Though the game did not get nearly as much attention as I think it should have, Toejam and Earl on the original SEGA was incredibly fun! Ages ago, back when Geocities was still around (who remembers them?) I had made a tiny fan website for the series. When Geocities went away, I moved it to my personal site, where it still sits. I even made a Toejam and Earl Facebook page. (Me? Obsessed? Whatever gave you that idea?)

Anyway – the game, Toejam and Earl was introduced to me by my Chuck and Tammy Stevens (who I have literally known since like the beginning of time). I remember countless hours of playing Toejam and Earl on the SEGA with them. I would actually spend an entire night over there, over and over again, laughing so hard – whether it was hilarious sound bytes found in the game (“Boogey! Boogey! Boogey!”), or just the general game play – Toejam and Earl provided endless amounts of entertainment. While, I felt the second one had less of an impact (the side scrolling took away from the splitting up and exploring, and also took away from falling off the world type situation with rocket skates!) – it was still an entertaining game. And when they announced Toejam and Earl III exclusively for the XBOX – it became the sole reason I originally purchased the XBOX.

To this day, I still own a functioning SEGA with Toejam Earl 1 and 2, as well as purchasing both games on the Wii’s store, through the emulator. I have yet to purchase them on Steam (you can get Toejam and Earl 1 here and Toejam and Earl 2 here).

I got in contact with Greg, through the Toejam and Earl website and told him about the little fan page I had done; as well as the Facebook page I had created (which he joined). I bounced emails with Greg, every so often – and when it came time to wrap up Neverending Nights in Season 3 – I thought, “How awesome would it be to have Greg lend a voice?”

So when I asked Greg, he agreed to do it – but said he could get me in touch with “real” voice actors – and I had explained that this wasn’t trying to find amazing voice talent for Neverending Nights – it was me, wanting to include people who made a difference in my life – in the series, as a way of saying thank you. He had asked me how he wanted to do the voice – and I told him to do what he wanted. To have fun with it. Give the character any kind of spin he wanted.

What he delivered only cemented his awesomeness. He did the voice as Lamont, from Toejam and Earl III. It was such an amazing addition.

Greg appeared in Episode 56: Funkafied.