"At the time, DP was paying generously, so I could kind of work on my craft. Those early days at Shiny were incredibly fun, and I grew to deeply love my teammates. We worked hard ... often 18 hour days even on weekends, and we made one of the greatest games of all time." He describes the Shiny team as "the right team at the right place at the right time with the right character," adding, "Earthworm Jim changed a bit over time, especially since Mike and Ed did much of his standard (run, jump, shoot) animation, which is really how the look of a character is described. I was more in charge of the bad guys." He cites Mike and Ed as his inspirations, saying, "There are few inspirations in gaming, but I've always enjoyed my work-mates Mike Dietz and Ed Schofield. We challenged each other on Earthworm Jim to really push our animation skills. They have been mentors both in animation and in real life because they are skilled artists but also successful family men, a rare combination."
When I asked him about the process of designing a character, because it can't all be Fleetwood Mac and desperate drawing, he said, "Well, there's a tough question. You're asking about 'the blue spark' that fires and magic happens. I don't know exactly how it happens, but I know it's extremely easy for me to create characters and worlds. It's something I've always done and it's one of the few things I'm really good at. The process is always done with a pencil and paper, and since I draw every day, I create critters every day. The public has only seen very few because there are only very few that a business is willing to put money into to bring them to your eyes. Nobody has paid for you to see my best work, but you get the idea of what I'm about from what you've already seen."
Curious, especially with such halcyon talk of days gone by, I asked what happened, why Dave Perry and Shiny get most of the credit for his characters. "After five months of production on the Earthworm Jim game, I still hadn't assigned the character to Shiny, so it was getting dangerous for them to still be doing the character unless they were going to take it by force and challenge me to take it back. Dave and I shared works and Mike D. was kind of the referee. [Dave] needed the rights to the character, and I wanted to make sure I controlled the character, so he didn't get whored out to make porn or who knows what. I also wanted credit as creator, and I wanted to make a small per-cartridge rate. DP ended up agreeing to a signage of rights where we shared creative control, I got a small per-cart rate and credit where marketing deemed convenient. We were both teary-eyed because we needed the other to compromise, and I'm a lover, not a fighter, so I bit the bullet and trusted him. It was the single biggest business mistake of my entire career."
According to TenNapel in a separate interview, he retained "a small level of approval and creative control which I contractually have to share with Dave 'Earthworm Lance' Perry. They're supposed to pay me a minimum royalty on every Jim thing sold but Interplay's lawyers have loop-holed their way around having to pay me a cent." The rights to the franchise have traveled with bankruptcies over the years, from Interplay to Infogrames, then to the re-born Atari, and TenNapel has been largely out of the loop. Games made largely outside of his control include Earthworm Jim 3D, described by Gamasutra as "a success neither commercially nor critically" and the largely forgotten Earthworm Jim: Menace 2 the Galaxy.
