By the mid-90s, Earthworm Jim was everywhere. The Genesis and SNES versions were loud, weird, gorgeous, and iconic. A run-and-gun platformer about a worm in a robot suit that was extremely fun to tell your friends about. Of course, it was critical people could take Jim with them on the go, so here’s the story of how it got shrunk down for a handheld while maintaining the fun factor.
Eurocom Didn't Take Shortcuts
The Game Boy version was handled by Eurocom, a UK studio that built its reputation on console ports that punched far above their weight class. Faced with a smaller screen and a fraction of the horsepower, they opted to redesign the game from the ground up. Stages were reworked to fit the Game Boy's dimensions and constraints, rather than remain crammed in and left to break. The result plays like a game that was designed originally for the hardware.
Of course animation frames were cut, but the character sprites stayed large, and Jim still reads as Jim. The enemies are clearly recognizable and the bosses still loom over Jim. On a screen that size, keeping that much personality intact is the whole trick, and Eurocom pulled it off.
Singular Earthworm Jim Vibes
Similar to Sonic, Earthworm Jim as a playable character has a very distinct personality. The GB version captures the feel of the original. The springy movement, the chaos, the sense of humor baked into the level design but in compact form.
For a lot of people, this was the first version. Plenty of players who never owned a Genesis or SNES met Jim for the first time on a Game Boy, and they remember it fondly for exactly that reason. Retro communities tend to describe it not as a lesser copy but as a compact edition of the original, distilled down to what fits in your hands.
Chromatic Edition Has Inched Closer To Perfection
We left the game itself alone where it counts. What we’ve added is the stuff that respects your time. This release includes an auto-save and a level select feature, so you can pick up where you left off, and jump back to the stage you actually want to play, without grinding through everything before it. The game is still the game. We just removed the friction that the hardware of 1995 couldn't help but build in.
On the Chromatic, with its pixel-perfect display, this is Earthworm Jim the way that first generation of handheld players wished they could see it: sharp, clear, and exactly as strange as it was always meant to be.
