That Video Game From Community Is Real, And It’s Amazing
Before Dan Harmon rocketed into the limelight thanks to the success of Rick and Morty, and before Donald Glover took off as Childish Gambino, there was Community. A sitcom about Greendale Community College, where episodes involved school-wide paintball fights, zombie invasions, record-breaking pillow forts, and the birth of new societies based on upstart social media platforms.
The show follows six distinct personalities thrown into a study group who soon become fast friends, as they navigate life, the school’s strange happenings, and try to scrape a passing grade. It holds a very dear place in my heart, and I still utter film nerd Abed’s phrase of ‘coolcoolcool’ every single day. It’s a show I revisit every couple of years, and I recently rewatched Digital Estate Planning, an episode where the study group has to play through a video game to win their friend Pierce’s inheritance. I told you, it’s a weird show.
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It’s the kind of video game that looks cool but you know you’ll never play, like the one with the foul-mouthed robot in Her, or the psychedelic trip of a game in Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, made by real video game developers. Well, turns out this one is real, and it’s awesome. It’s at least ten years old, but it’s free to download and play and it’s all I’ve been doing in my spare time these last two nights.
Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne looks exactly as it does in the show. It’s a pixelated 2D platformer with an 8-bit soundtrack and sprites. The game has been created by a team of volunteer developers and is open-source, in case anyone wants to work on bug fixes or improvements. It’s a colossal community (ha) effort, one that its creators believe to be completed.
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