Two indie devs are pitching a Seinfeld adventure game
"Why's it called a 'point-and-click' game? Isn't every game where you use a mouse about pointing and clicking, really? What's that about?"
Seinfeld's peak popularity coincided with that of the point-and-click adventure game. And yet there was no officially licensed LucasArts Seinfeld game, or even a Telltale version after the fact. This injustice will not stand, at least if Jacob Janerka and Ivan Dixon have anything to do with it.
Janerka is the creator of Paradigm, and has been sharing gifs of a hypothetical pixel-art Seinfeld game on the internet for years. Dixon co-runs an animations studio, and has made music videos as well as pixel intros for shows like The Simpsons. As they say on their website, "You may be thinking, “You idiots, why would you make a game based on a sitcom that last aired over 20 years ago and potentially incur the wrath of lawyers like Reddit user Dingdongs313 warned you about?”" The plan is to pitch their idea for "a game about nothing" to the internet as a way of drumming up interest before they approach the actual rights holders.
The video above is that pitch. It looks basically ideal, especially the idea of having Kramer as a force of uncontrollable chaos rather than a playable character. The plot summary they've come up with, for a story called 'The Email', reads like an homage to the actual episode 'The Phone Message' (the one where George tries to delete a message he left on his girlfriend's answering machine before she hears it), only with a killer twist. I don't know about you, but I'm sold on this idea.
Here's the website they've made for their pitch, and if you're an internet lawyer who learned the phrase "cease and desist" a year ago and would like somewhere to type it that's apparently what the comments section is for.
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.