Johnston clarification: Not really Frogger

Seth Schiesel reviews Hi, How Are You, the new iPhone video game based to some degree on Daniel Johnston iconography. Earlier coverage portrayed it as “a kind of psycho-religious version of Frogger,” but Schiesel sets the record straight:

Frogger is about dodging objects in motion and jumping from one moving platform to another. Hi, How Are You is about tilting the iPhone itself to direct a little cartoonlike figure along pathways suspended in space without falling off. (You can also put your finger on a virtual joystick on the iPhone screen instead of using the motion-sensitive tilt controls.)

So in its game play Hi, How Are You is very similar to Sega’s eight-year-old Super Monkey Ball franchise, a parallel that becomes obvious partway through, when you transition from controlling a bouncing cube with eyes to controlling a rolling ball with eyes.

OK!

Daniel Johnston vidgame: A ‘psycho-religious Frogger’

Wonderful piece by Randy Kennedy today about a new iPhone game inspired by Daniel Johnston, “who has never owned any kind of cellphone, let alone an iPhone, and has no telephone at all in his house in a small town northwest of Houston.”

The game — called “Hi, How Are You,” one of Mr. Johnson’s catchphrases — was created by two designers in Austin, Tex., who said they had always been enamored of Mr. Johnston’s music and wanted to find an entertaining way to use it while bringing to life the characters that people his artwork. They have names like Jeremiah the Innocent (who takes the form of, among others, a frog with eyes on stalks) and Joe Boxer (a pugilist missing the top of his head).

The result is a kind of psycho-religious version of Frogger, the classic arcade game. In Frogger the objective is to make it, unsquashed and undrowned, across a busy highway and a rushing river. In “Hi, How Are You” it is to navigate Jeremiah and other embodiments of the protagonist through a morally fraught three-dimensional world of glowing red demon babies and other malign forces seeking to keep him from the girl of his dreams, a recurring motif for Mr. Johnston, who suffers from severe bipolar disorder.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of the game.