Jazz Jackrabbit Jumps Past Mario on PC – Today in History – May 3rd, 1994
While today 2D side scrolling action platform titles are a regular occurrence, they are still not as popular they were on consoles 20+ years ago. Jazz Jackrabbit was not perfect but it was lightyears ahead of similar titles on personal computers of the time. If you were a fan of action platform titles and only owned a computer then you knew the name of Jazz Jackrabbit quite well. This is the first game in a series of titles created for Epic MegaGames by Arjan Brussee and Cliff Bleszinski.
Did you know that, for a period of time, Jazz Jackrabbit was the mascot of Epic MegaGames?
Jazz Jackrabbit was a colorful title, this was quite a standout against PC titles of the time. During this period first person shooters were taking over and so were real time strategy games. Neither of those genres were known for producing colorful titles. Jazz Jackrabbit was a standout for both the style and the color scheme chosen. It did help that it was a quality title that was known by many console gamers (even though it never was released on a console).
Interestingly, several Jazz Jackrabbit characters appear in One Must Fall: 2097 on personal computers. Pay attention to the pilots of certain mechs and see if you recognize any familiar faces. Also, there were One Must Fall: 2097 cameos in the first Jazz Jackrabbit game- how cool is that?
Epic has not forgotten their former mascot in recent times either. When they released the development kits they included a homage to the jumping rabbit. Contained within the tutorials for the Unreal Engine is one featuring an overhead dual stick shooter version of Jazz Jackrabbit. Pretty neat.
There has been a series of titles in the Jazz Jackrabbit library that spanned personal computers and at least one appearance on the Game Boy Advance. Head over to Ebay or check Amazon
It's weird... I enjoyed all the 8-bit and 16-bit Mario and Sonic platformers, and so Jazz Jackrabbit being the "edgier" cousin of those two, should've grown on me easily. However, I played through the shareware episode and I didn't really enjoy it all that much. On the other hand, I had plenty of fun taking my Jaguar or Nova and destroying whatever HARs Jazzy, Eva Earlong, or Devan Shell were piloting in OMF: 2097 when they made their cameo appearances in the tournament mode.
I only came into playing Jazz later in life, long after the recommended system requirements were probably considered "retro". It is a decent game but it is definitely missing something - that something that most Japanese developed 2D platformers seem to have.
What a classic. One of my favorite games for sure.
Not knocking it, it is a good game, just missing something. Something that is hard to pinpoint.
Yeah, it probably had its flaws... The physics of the first game especially were a bit clunky.
I remember though, the second version was a lot of fun to play with friends. I once sneak used the comparatively "fast" Internet access during a middle school biology class (I think it was, we were researching animals) and found cheats, that we would then use aggressively during multi-player sessions as well. :p I was initially looking for information about rabbits, but one of the first search results on the then popular Altavista search engine happened to be cheats for the game. :)
Probably mostly the nostalgia that makes it so good for myself. But they weren't bad games.
I completely agree that the Jazz games were not bad, they just weren't quite what I was looking for when I played them. I felt the same way about Unreal versus Quake - it just wasn't quite what I was looking for.
I grew up on consoles though so that meant having a Nintendo NES and the Super Mario games which were hard to beat. Still, Jazz broke ground in an area that Mario still has not attempted with any real backing - PC action platform 2D games. For that, Jazz deserves respect.
That's interesting, for me it was the other way around. I grew up on PC; DOS, then Win 3.1, then Win 95, etc. (Super Mario was one of the early DOS games I played.) Having a Nintendo 64 was my dream and eventually I accidentally got a Super Nintendo instead. I had already played some NES emulators on PC by then, but it was still a noticeable difference that took some getting used to.
I was limited to TRS-80 and TI-94's till around 1998 or so myself - that is when I decided to take this "windows plunge". I mainly had a computer around for one thing, writing. I wrote school assignments using them, short stories, fan fiction, etc. and saved it to audio cassettes or floppy disks later on (such as on my brother's Commodore 64).
I remember playing a lot of games on my brother's C64 along with my friend @JerryPerkinsII and on his C64. IT was an awesome computer and deserved such a long life that it has been enjoying.
Sounds awesome... Makes me wish I had gotten to experience that era. =)