A couple years ago, blobby contacted me about an article on Jazz Jackrabbit 2 she was writing for issue 252 of Retro Gamer Magazine, asking to interview me to contribute to the article. I don't know the reason why the article never appeared... blobby was having serious health issues at the time, and after a while I never heard back from her. I have only speculation beyond that. But here's the interview. Normally this kind of thing would appear in J2O's articles section, but that's been archived, so I'm using a JCF thread instead.


-What drew you to Jazz Jackrabbit 2 in the first place?
I got it around its release, because it was typical of games I played at the time--e.g. Hocus Pocus, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and of course Jazz Jackrabbit 1--except clearly technically more advanced. Honestly, though, it didn't make too much of an impression on release... it was only three years later, when I checked out the online multiplayer and the level editor and the vast trove of fanmade levels, that it really clicked for me. I'd made content for other games before, but usually they would just sit on my hard drive, or at best I would get an occasional email of acknowledgement. Here in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was an entire community revolving around creating ever more elaborate levels, wild graphics, and new gameplay ideas, with instant feedback available for anything I wanted to try making.

-What has kept you involved with the game over the years?
Jazz 2's editing tools are so easy to use that basically anyone can make basically anything they want, and people around the world will play it with them--it's the idea that's the important thing. We've seen some truly wild projects over the years departing in unexpected ways from traditional Jazz 2 levels, telling original stories or experimenting with radical graphic styles or studying single gameplay mechanics in immense detail. There are huge campaigns inspired by Jurassic Park or Tomb Raider. One multiplayer mod replaces rabbits with flying spaceships with healthbars and a totally new set of weapons. We've seen people make essentially tech demos that replicate other games' core mechanics inside Jazz 2, like Teeworlds or Towerfall. There've been levels that play like Jazz 2 crossed with Animal Crossing, Runescape, Super Meat Boy, Sonic, Spelunky, or even Monopoly. A few months ago somebody recreated the encroaching storm from Battle Royale games like Fortnite. And then there are hundreds and hundreds of levels that aren't trying to do something that new, but are just trying to do something really really well.

But my pet theory for why people do this for Jazz 2 in particular is that the game feels unfinished. The game feels like a challenge from the developers to the players, to do what they couldn't. For example, not many enemies actually attack you. There are all these cool objects that are used once and never again. None of the official multiplayer levels are any good. The core gameplay feels like they couldn't quite figure out how to make it work before they shipped it. But it's all close enough that people still find it fun, so for decades we've sat around and tried to be the person who finishes the game. "Here's my idea for what Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is supposed to be--what do you all think? What's your idea? And what about yours?"

-Have there been other games that have taken similar levels of attention?
No. I've had intense, passionate affairs with certain games or other fandoms but nothing so sustained. It's been over 22 years now--there's not enough room in life for more than one thing like that.

-What have been your favourite times in the Jazz 2 fandom?
In the mid-2000s there was a community focus on adding new multiplayer gamemodes to match FPS games that were popular at the time. This was before JJ2+ had added a scripting language, so we knew more or less what our technical limits were; we just had to find ways to do things with the limited tools we had. Things that JJ2+ gives you for free now, like Team Battle or Jailbreak, we had to find these elaborate ways to craft inside the level editor. There were all these celebrity levelmakers with idea after idea, and everyone got so excited whenever they released something new. Adding to that, there were lots of online multiplayer events where everyone got together to play specifically the newer or wilder stuff, so there was lots of incentive to keep creating so you could be featured in those events.

-How involved have you been in guiding the development of JJ2+?
Because this is a hobby project for all of us, what goes into JJ2+ is more or less whatever we feel like coding. And because I've been JJ2+'s most prolific contributor pretty consistently since joining the team in mid-2012--when BlurredD, who'd been running the project by himself for a few years, decided to step back--a lot of that has been whatever I feel like coding. Obviously we're a team and give each other feedback and sometimes decide not to pursue certain features, and we're all in conversation with the playerbase about their priorities, and it's especially valuable when they find new JJ2+ bugs that didn't turn up in internal testing, or when they simply have different use patterns. Widescreen support and improved controller support, for example, were not on my radar until community members requested them. There's a fangame with a weapon wheel, so I've got an internal code branch with a weapon wheel. But ultimately, I play this game an awful lot, and that means I have decades' worth of things I've always wanted to be able to do.

-What have you found most enjoyable about the in-built level creation tools?
Jazz 2's creators have been clear that moddability, to use a more modern term, was a huge development focus. The best example of this is water: there is only one level with water in all the official Jazz 2 levels, but almost every enemy and other object has code specifically to detect whether it's underwater and move differently. In general there are no restrictions: you can combine any elements together from any parts of the game you want, if you think they might be fun together, and nothing will go wrong. You can follow the standard level design patterns as much or as little as you please, amid flat MSPaint graphics or screenshots of 3D models or anything in-between. Anything you want to make can be prototyped and played in a matter of minutes, because the tools are so easy to use. And for years there was always more to discover (and now that's true again, with JJ2+'s scripting language)... the silver crates and "lock blocks," for example, are assumed to have been fairly late additions to the game, but they are massively powerful and can make basically any change to a level, including redrawing the whole background.

-What would you like to see for the future of the community?
I hope the spirits of discovery and analysis rekindle themselves. In an odd way it helped that Epic Games stopped supporting Jazz 2 so quickly, because it meant there wasn't a central force. We were all working together to discover what we could do. People made so many websites and wrote so many articles showing off their ideas and teaching other people new tricks. So I hope people will feel that way again: even if something isn't fully documented, they can try it out and learn for themselves how to use it. And I hope whenever they do, there will be people there who will praise them and will love the new thing they have made, to ensure they're incentivized to keep making more. Jazz 2 was never a game that stood still, and it shouldn't be one now.

-Are you eager to see any particular further tools developed for the game such as your level editor? Or any further major additions to JJ2+ that might give the game greater depth?
When people make tools, they always surprise me. I would never have expected the external client that makes Jazz 2 play like Runescape, or the website that tracks your gameplay stats over time instead of having them disappear after each round. Not every tool is one I'm personally interested in using, but they're always a marvel.

As for JJ2+, there's long been a divide in how people see the game: either as a living multiplayer shooter with even more maps and gamemodes and features than its 3D competitors, or as a "retro game" that people try to make run on Windows 95 machines or CRT monitors. I think the solution is to take a really good look at single player gameplay, which apart from (sometimes crucial) bug fixes, hasn't changed since 1998. Obviously I don't want to get rid of the classic gameplay, this will all be optional, but modern remakes and rereleases have lots of new ideas for how to interact with old games. Speedruns, randomizers, aiming, alternate layouts, accessibility options, level browsers... we can take hundreds and hundreds of old levels and make them play like new, in ways that will still be fun for new players even decades after the last multiplayer servers finally shut down.

Fantastic read, thank you for sharing this.