ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron

ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron is a platform video game developed by Johnson Voorsanger Productions and published by Sega in 1993 for the Mega Drive. The game is the sequel to the cult video game ToeJam & Earl, which was released in 1991. The game is about two alien protagonists, ToeJam and Earl, who escaped from Earth, where they crash-landed. After returning to their home planet, Funkotron, the two discover that some hostile Earthlings have hidden in their spaceship and are wreaking havoc on the planet. The player must hunt down these Earthlings and lock them in jars before sending them back to Earth. The game's platform format was a departure from the original ToeJam & Earl, a treasure hunting game with randomly generated levels inspired by the game Rogue. Creators Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger originally began developing a game based on the concepts of the original, but then switched to a more generic type of game because Sega did not support their vision. Critics praised the graphics, the soundtrack, the fluid action and the two-player mode. It was also a commercial success, but fans of ToeJam & Earl were disappointed and confused by the radical change in direction. Since its release, ToeJam & Earl has been criticized in Panic on Funkotron for being too different from the first game, and some later reviewers felt that the developers had gone more by the wishes of the publisher than those of the fans. Johnson and Voorsanger have stated that they regret deviating from their prototype of a ToeJam & Earl-style sequel. Surveys have shown that a significant minority of fans consider ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron to be the best game in the series. Together with its predecessor, the game forms one of the Mega Drive's "most important exclusive franchises", which eventually spawned a third installment in 2002, although it was a commercial failure with mixed reviews. ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron was remade for the Wii's Virtual Console in 2007 and received mixed reviews. In November 2012, the game was released on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade along with its predecessor. In August 2014, ToeJam Earl 2 was listed as the 10th "Best Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Game of All Time" by GamesRadar.