March 3-9, 2005
naked city
Alien Invasion
 Pac mentality: Alien Hominid's little yellow title character (above right) and early character sketches from Dan Paladin's notebook.  |
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How Drexel grad Tom Fulp's little yellow Alien Hominid conquered GameCube and PlayStation 2.
In a world dominated by hyperrealistic, 3-D action video games, one sometimes yearns for the simple days of 2-D gaming when heroes vanquished their foes by jumping on their heads or shooting them with power pellets. Alien Hominid, a 2-D side-scroll action throwback game with new-school graphics, cartoonlike animation and local ties, fills a void for folks who miss the halcyon days of games like Contra.
In the game, players experience the struggles of a little yellow alien who crash-lands on Earth and whose spaceship is jacked by the feds. He must shoot, slice and eat through an army of robotic bosses and an unlimited supply of hostile FBI agents standing between him and his ride. Since its release for both GameCube and PlayStation 2 in November, Alien Hominid has become an underground success with hardcore gamers scrambling for copies.
The story of Hominid is as full of twists and turns as the title character's on-screen journey. It starts back in 1995 when Tom Fulp, one of the game's designers, was a 16-year-old senior at Pennridge High in Bucks County. Around that time he set up Newgrounds.com, a Web site devoted to showcasing Flash animation games and shorts.
Fulp used to design cartoon shorts on his Amiga, an animating system from the early '90s that produced Sega Genesis-caliber graphics. In school, for any project where he could choose his own medium, he would make a cartoon to show the kids in his class. For Fulp, Newgrounds was a "chance to have more than 24 people see" his stuff, says the Glenside resident.
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Some of his most popular Flash games during the site's early years included Assassin, wherein people could release their pent-up, mid-'90s pop revival rage by shooting members of 'N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Hanson, and Club a Seal, a game that is more or less self-explanatory.
When Fulp graduated high school and enrolled at Drexel in 1997, Newgrounds evolved as well. "For the first years, it was strictly for fun," he says, "then it became a business." He began to sell ad space on the site. All was well until the dot-com bubble burst and advertisers ran screaming from the Internet.
To make matters worse, in 1999 the BBC was coming down on Fulp for his shorts mocking the Teletubbies. BBC Worldwide issued a cease and desist order to Fulp to take the likenesses of its intellectual property off the site. Internet Freedom, a U.K. Net watchdog group, came to the rescue, issuing a press release on the BBC's threat, calling it an attempt to infringe on Fulp's free speech rights. The network backed off. Since then, Fulp has steered clear of parodies, sticking instead to original creations.
Things started to look up again in 2002 as advertisers returned and Newgrounds pulled out of the red. Fulp formed an online partnership with frequent Newgrounds animation contributor Dan Paladin of San Diego. The two created an early Flash version of Alien Hominid for Newgrounds. "We started this project before we ever met in person," says Fulp.
The short Flash game was well-received, so on April Fools' Day 2003, Fulp and Paladin decided to stop playing around. They committed to taking their free Internet game and transforming it into a longer version for game consoles, like GameCube and PlayStation 2.
To complete the project, they needed backup. Paladin grabbed two of his friends from San Diego, producer John Baez and "hardcore" console programmer Brandon Lacava. The four formed a game designing unit called The Behemoth.
For the next year and a half, Alien Hominid became the center of their lives. Baez mortgaged his home to fund the project and lived off savings. Paladin sold his home to come out to Philadelphia and survived off of a living stipend from The Behemoth's expense account. Fulp lived off the money Newgrounds brought in. They hired outsiders to do the background art and the music, but everything else came from the small Behemoth staff. "It was a gamble," Fulp says in retrospect. "A lot of companies didn't believe it was going to go anywhere."
Defying conventional wisdom, they kept the game's 2-D side-scroll style and cartoonish animation, reminiscent of Fulp's favorite games as a kid: Gunstar Heroes, Metal Slug and the legendary Contra.
After all the hard work, the ultimate reward will probably be, from Fulp's perspective, to break even and make back the quarter-million dollars spent on the endeavor. "I don't know if we'll make good profit," he says, hoping the "next game will be all profit." (The game is available in retail stores as well as at www.alienhominid.com.)
For the moment, Fulp and Paladin (who moved to his hometown of Cleveland to be close to his girlfriend) are working on a new Flash game about a bully beating up kids on the playground. Fulp is enjoying the return to his Flash roots. "You spend 18 months on Alien Hominid and only people who buy it play it," while with Flash games, "all play for free."
"If we do another [console] game, it will probably be something different. But if we're still around for a third game, it will probably be another Hominid. Right now, though, we're a little burned out."
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