"Drawing a Sexy Rabbit" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
"It's hard to draw a sexy rabbit," said Nick Stadtler, lead artist on Jazz Jackrabbit in 1994, not realising that he was directly contributing to my generation's obsession with furry art. Well, it may have been hard for him to draw a sexy rabbit, but now it's perfectly commonplace. Even I've done it! See?
Admittedly, I've drawn her sexier than this, but you don't get to see that 💋
Really, Jazz Jackrabbit is why "Drawing a Sexy Rabbit" exists in the first place. Last year, whilst I was writing music for the untitled Doom II project (you know, the one that "No One Told Me About DOOM" came from), I also wrote a song inspired by my other favourite MS-DOS game. I'd had an idea earlier in the month about a 3rd sequel, which I'd called JJ3: Junior in the Jungle; without going into it too much, Jazz and Eva's 3 kids get kidnapped by Devan Shell's son and imprisoned on a jungle planet, Bungelius, but they break out and have to return to Carrotus before their folks pay the ransom. Anyway, "Drawing a Sexy Rabbit" (named for Nick's 30-year-old comment on the JJ helpscreen) was supposed to be Bungelius's stage music. It's heavily inspired by Diamondus from JJ1, without actually being Diamondus. And, yes, the General MIDI soundset would have persisted into the actual game, because the graphical style would have resembled JJ1 and I wanted to keep the whole "computer game" theme consistent across the whole project. As you can imagine, that idea went nowhere and "Drawing" is the only relic of that particular chase. I got busy with Doom (both music and mapmaking), a couple of "real life" things happened, and I left the Jazz brainspace.
I still believe in the idea, and it's enough of a transformative work that Epic Games & Crypto couldn't do anything to stop it. Corporate gaming needs to be stopped if we want to come out of the Video Game Crash of 2024; I am a firm believer in the idea that games use UHD photorealism to cover up a lack of depth in the story, shallow gameplay, and a replay factor of zero. Jazz Jackrabbit is still a good game, 21 years on, that you can plunk yourself down at the Internet Archive or D-Fend Reloaded and play for hours... but that's a discussion for another time.
--20 May 2024--