LM: The gameplay is the most imaginative. I mean you have no hands, but you can just about survive anything, crawl up all sorts of surfaces, and hang upside down. It opens up areas of the playing interface that doesn’t exist in any other game. How was this to work with?

Alex: We had to come up with some sort of challenge or impasse in the game. In real life, they can basically go wherever the heck they want. So we had to make these contrived barriers. We also had to make the world smaller. Originally when we were more ambitious, we were thinking like a six-story building; tons of other stuff.

LM: When you did this, were you even thinking about who would be playing your game? It isn’t an action game, it’s pure adventure—but the subject matter and environments are definitely out there. So who was your intended market?

Alex: Well, we were just thinking gross stuff and who loves that? Our market tends to be 19 to 25 year olds. I think that’s what we were thinking.

LM: Ok, so why re-publish and why now?

Alex: Somebody in France actually called Pulse up and was interested in re-publishing the game. They emailed Pulse, which is not releasing any more games at this point. And they thought, well who would know about this? So they decided that the only person who knew anything about the technical aspects of this and could pull it all together was me, at that point.

They said, “Are you interested in seeing if this thing could be done?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll take a look at it.” And then the French guys flaked out. So then I thought, well, since I have already put all this effort into it, it is a cult classic and so on. Maybe I can find another publisher. I mean, Myst is still being published by Ubi Soft.

Some people were kind of interested, others not interested. Then I got into a conversation with Got Game and we just clicked. We talked for about a half hour and I kind of knew then that if I could pull it together these were the guys I wanted to do it.

Got Game also asked me if we were going to do anything else with the game. So I called Phill Simon, who’s the other producer on the game and asked him what he thought we could do. He said, “Why don’t we make a ‘making of’ segment?” I recalled that we had this extra footage of behind-the-scenes stuff we had shot on high 8. And I still had that tape. So we thought, well, maybe we could put together a DVD with a ‘making of’ director’s commentary on it. Like when you get a video and it has all these special extras on there. I always loved hearing all that stuff; why they made the decisions they did or used this process; what happened during the production.

LM: Sometimes the special features are the best part of the DVD.

Alex: Yeah. And fortunately, this is one of the best-archived projects I have ever had the fortune to work with. So Phill is going “This is great stuff! Great stuff. If we could finally do it—that would be wonderful.” We had planned on this back when the game first released, but we didn’t have a medium for it. Now that the game is being re-published with a DVD, we can include this.

The main theme of the "making of" segment is to tell everyone what it was like to make the game and also put faces to each member of the team. Actually we only have the one photo in the bar. There’s a photo of us as a football team inside the bar level of the game. We are all painted in as football players. Nobody really knows who each of us is. I am making a screen right now, which highlights each face and says who it is.

LM: Did you have any further plans for Bad Mojo back when it first released?

Alex: Well, I did think about putting the game online. Vinny, Phill and I actually got spun out of Pulse Entertainment as Jinx. But we had a contract with them to do another game. The three of us picked up that contract and finished it. You might have heard of it. It’s called Space Bunnies Must Die. It’s not our best effort.

LM: What! *Laughs* I forgot that you guys did do Space Bunnies. It’s in my circle of hell shelf. How did you go from Bad Mojo to Space Bunnies?

Alex: You know given what we had...we didn’t have a lot of technology; we were trying to make the game with technology that was still developing as we were shipping. And then they spun us out. So we looked at it and said, well we could probably finish the game. It is a testament to my team to say that we actually shipped it.

I think that game could have been real good. The difference between Bad Mojo and this game is the character control. In Bad Mojo, you are driving around as a cockroach and you don’t even think about it. ‘Cause it just works. When we did Space Bunnies, it was herky-jerky. If I could do it all over, maybe I would.

LM: One of the things I really liked in Bad Mojo was the tongue-in-cheek stuff. It’s just a fun game. Sometimes, people do tend to take their gaming way too seriously. I think a few of them need better meds. I want to post at them… “Hey, griefer – it is a game – A GAME!”

Alex: I read a couple of reviews where they said the acting wasn’t that great. I wanted to say, “There’s a reason why we have shot campy video." We wanted it to be that way. We are not talking about trying for some Oscar award-winning performance. We’re talking about a game here.

LM: Well it’s not a category yet as far as I know, Oscar performances or not. When Bad Mojo was released the first time, did you make any money?

Alex: I personally didn’t make any money off of it, but Pulse did pretty well with it. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I am pretty sure we sold over 200,000 units.

LM: Whoa, 200,000 unit sales are phenomenal, particularly for 1995. Speaking of the timeline on this, what have you done to bring Bad Mojo up to today’s standards?

Alex: The only thing we are really trying to change is the compatibility with QuickTime. Which is the reason why the original game doesn’t play well on computers right now. If you try and play it on today’s machines, sometimes you have a problem with the movies after they play. It kind of pauses for a long time. If you had a Mac, it would work perfectly.

LM: Well yeah, everything works perfectly on a Mac.

Alex: *laughs* The Mac version is really beautiful. Even though the game screens are in 8-bit, the movies play in millions of colors. So they come out better in the game on a Mac. In the new version, I have made the movies 20% larger. So you can actually see more of the detail.

LM: Well, the screen size is fairly small.

Alex: It’s still going to be 640 x 480. We don’t have the ability to re-do the art and make it larger. It’s actually compiled in a 16-bit compiler, although systems today are 32-bit operating systems. Which is another part of the problem. Technically the game is going to be roughly the same. Just the movies are going to be a little bit larger and have MP3 sound. And on the Windows version they will now play in thousands or millions of colors. The overall quality of the movies will be better.

LM: That sounds very good to me. Is there anything you’d like to throw out to people or have them take note of about Bad Mojo?

Alex: I think the one thing I really want gamers to think about is the type of games they actually like. When we were making this game, there weren’t a lot of 3D shoot ‘em ups. There weren’t a lot of pre-packaged feeling games. Now, they are all the same. Shoot ‘em up, go to this level, collect all this stuff. You just can’t keep on making formula games. And I hope one day, gamers realize there’s something to be said for having unique games. Like Bad Mojo.