Funky Alien Questions!
Q. Who made Toejam and Earl originally?
A. That would be Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger.
Let me drop some info about those whackey Earthlings!
For the past seventeen years, Greg Johnson has been an independent game designer, establishing a unique reputation for creativity and character design. He has published seven successful software titles, winning numerous prestigious awards, and receiving wide-spread acclaim. The winning team of Greg, and ten-year business partner, Mark Voorsanger , has repeatedly resulted in creations of uncompromising quality and ingenuity.
Greg’s first titles, Starflight along with its sequel, published by Electronic Arts, sold close to one million units, and has been credited as the first successful graphic adventure game for the PC.
Throughout 1998 and 1999, Greg served as Creative Director for ePlanet, Inc., a company dedicated to developing new vision-based technology and to creating ground breaking vision-enabled software products. Greg designed several products for EP, including their flagship product, Freeblenux , a cutting edge, interactive, 3D, vision-enabled virtual character.
Greg has spoken on computer game and interface design, both at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference and at Stanford University. He speaks Japanese and Thai almost fluently, and enjoys writing children’s stories as well as designing and playing board games. He received his bachelor’s degree in Bio-Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego.
Mark Voorsanger has managed and directed the development of CD-ROM titles, cartridge-based video games, standard PC titles, full-motion video-based products, and other cutting-edge systems.
Before founding ToeJam & Earl Productions with Greg Johnson, Mark was a lead programmer for Hasbro’s project NEMO, where he helped to develop the first full-motion interactive games for in-home use. That work was eventually to become Night Trap , for the Sega CD. Still earlier in his career, he programmed two games for Imagic: Fathom for the ColecoVision, and Demon Attack for the Tandy Color Computer.
Throughout 1999, Mark served as Project Lead for ePlanet, Inc. , where he led the team to create Freeblenux, the world’s first virtual alien with the gift with sight. This ground-breaking product, built for personal computers with a digital video camera attached, attracted the interest and financial backing of such prestigious partners as Intel, Mattel, Logitech, Hasbro, Nickelodeon, and Lego.
Mark has consulted in the design and development of games with companies such as LucasArts Entertainment, Activision, and Accolade.
Mark received his Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
