David Firth, the vivid imagination responsible for disturbing internet sensation Salad Fingers, revealed an in-development game earlier this month, a platformer following the misadventures of violent, mouthy delinquent Jerry Jackson.
Jackson's main character traits involve being a horrible little creature, making adobe flash animations, and speaking in all caps. He's a classic creation from the mind of Firth, who has been summoning sleep paralysis demons with his brain and trapping them in animations since 2004.
Firth first described the game in a video on his Youtube channel titled "I used to make games", which explores his early dives into game development as a teenager. The video's a ten-minute trip to an older internet era, one filled with crusty 2d animations made by edgy teenagers fed a diet of South Park.
"JErry jACkson LANDs turbo edition: the rune's off time - the stones of jon - qeust 4 the godlen sand of power" is a sentence I had to fight with my spellcheck just to quote properly, and also the title of Firth's upcoming game. It's currently "a whole four levels long, has bosses, story, dialogue, multiple modes, and plenty of unnecessary violence."
In an interview with Dualshockers he elaborated on the game's pricing and his creative process. "In the school, you can break everything—you can break the vending machine, you can knock the lights off, you can talk to people, bounce around on their heads if you want, or just bop them and they just kind of bleed and fall over."
"It just feels nice. It’s kind of crude and unnecessary, but in his world it seems necessary." He went on to say that he wants to get the game's runtime to at least an hour before releasing it, and plans to keep it cheap: "I’m not gonna charge £49.99. Make it a fiver or something.”
Watching footage of the game itself, I can't help but be enthralled by a time I thought I'd scrubbed from my memory. While most remember Salad Fingers, a thin and fragile looking creature with long, wrinkly fingers in a desolate world filled with death, my first exposure to his work was with Burnt Face Man.
I re-watched the first episode just to get into the right mindset to write this, and I can't say it speaks to me quite like it did to middle-school Harvey—neither does the footage of Jerry Jackson Land itself. Yet as is the case with most of his work, I'm glad it exists, and that he's still making stuff like it.
It's a distilled essence of early-internet weirdness that we don't quite see anymore, one that's remained untainted since Salad Fingers' debut in 2004. Even the artstyle's been preserved, like one of those fossil animals unchanged by evolution: a primordial early 2000s goop.
Firth doesn't have a timeline for the game's release, as he states in his video: "These are not coming soon. I have no intention of 'quitting', but who knows what's gonna happen. I made the mistake once of announcing something. Never again."
