E.T. Digital Companion (Game Boy Color)

Let E.T. help organize get togethers with your friends, setup to do lists for school projects, and create an address book of all your important names and phone numbers. Or just play some mini-games and try your hand at some E.T. trivia. This Game Boy Color game was my very first commercial video game project.

My first commercial game! When I first joined Powerhead Games they were finisheg their first game Mary-Kate and Ashley: Pocket Planner for Game Boy, and wanted to make anotehr planner using the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial license. It was my job to create ALL of the artwork which was so exciting as my first cool job out of college.

Creating art on the Game Boy Color was really exciting. You really had to plan ahead and think about how you will create various things do to teh memory limitations. I recall "famously" getting into a debate with the Tech Lead at the time about how I can make a huge character sprite fit into a rather large size on screen. He didn't think I could do it, but I proved him wrong! I was asked to work on user interface, mini game art, icons and background art.

There were two minigames I worked on for this gameI am really proud of. One was "Flopglopple", a virtual pet basaed on E.T.'s pet from the storybooks. Flopglopple was a huge onscreen character for the Game Boy days: 80x48 pixels (or ten 8x16 sprites wide by three sprites tall), though we a had to make sure that we didn't actually use all 10 sprites across, as the GBC had a strict sprites-per-line limit that required us to keep some empty spots in the character. He would play, eat, sleep, explore, and even talk to you via scrolling text marquee. We even got some cool effects in there, like a screen shake when Flopglopple knocks some fruit from a tree (my idea), or a subtle palette transition between day and night (in real time). It was extremely advanced for its time.

The other minigame I thought was cool was "Bicycle Chase". This was an Excitebike-style side scrolling bike game, with a variety of obstacles, ramps, pickups, and more. The levels were randomly generated by putting together pre-designed level chunks or "prefabs" of varying difficulty, and you could do flips and somersaults to power up E.T. so he could fly you to the end. It was awesome, and for a 22-year-old kid who grew up watching E.T., it was just about the coolest thing I could have imagined.

E.T. Digital Companion was developed by Powerhead Games and published by New Kid Co.