ARTICLE

Remake This! A Boy and His Blob

By Trevor Fehrman . October 31, 2006 . 8:42am

One of the great wacky premises of the NES era, A Boy and His Blob is the story of…well pretty much what you’d expect it to be a story of. In one of the earlier and more innovative console adventure titles A Boy and His Blob involves feeding your globular sidekick an arsenal of variously flavored jelly-beans to form him into assorted shapes. By doing this you make your way through a hostile environment until the game reaches its shocking conclusion (spoiler: you and your blob go to “Blobonia” and are greeted with much fanfare…no, seriously, “Blobonia”). Give him a licorice flavored bean and you’ve got yourself a handy ladder. Not gonna eat that strawberry bean yourself? Give it to your blob for a make shift bridge. Any chance you might need an umbrella? The list goes on…

So what makes A Boy and His Blob worthy of being remade? Well for one, I would really like to see what Blobonia would look like rendered in glorious 3D, but secondly because I always felt the first one (and as of writing this, the only one, sadly) never really lived up to its premise. The controls were clunky and many of the puzzles seemed too arbitrary. Now these problems were pretty standard fare back in the NES days, but perhaps with another go some clever developer could clean up those rough edges that were embedded in the title the first time around.

A Boy and His Blob is indicative of something which heretofore has been uniquely 80’s. For some unknown reason I’m sure owing itself somehow to the collective unconscious or something, several video games, cartoons, comics and TV shows in the 80’s had an almost identical setup: regular boy for no reason other than his curiosity gets yanked into some arcane alternate world which he must now escape from. End of setup.

If this column, by the grace of God manages to reach the appropriate ears, and A Boy and His Blob actually gets remade, this vital aspect of the game’s atmosphere must remain in tact for the sake of the fidelity of its soul. I don’t want to see some belabored story involving the political intricacies of Blobonia tacked on to the franchise in an attempt to modernize it. This need not be a complicated story, nor need it be an emotionally affecting story, nor need it be a good story. All it need be is a story about a boy. A boy and his blob.

Another important question to ask is how does one translate a 2D adventure/platformer to 3D. Well first off I think the game should remain non-violent. I don’t need to see a hummus flavored jelly bean turning the blob into a scimitar. The boy is a pacifist, that’s what gives his quest pathos. In a malevolent world our hero fights back not with his fists but with sugary snacks. Would that it were that G-Dubya would have had an NES when he was a lad we might be dropping Twinkies on the heads of Iraqi children rather then cluster bombs. As for the interface, I think that there will need to be some context sensitive system in place along the lines of Republic Commando or the multiplayer portion of the new Splinter Cell. Any kind of cue at all that helps the player not waste finite resources (i.e. jelly beans) trying to find out exactly where they need to activate their blob. The line, of course, between guide and walkthrough can be very thin, so whichever cue might be decided upon would have to be used appropriately.

And for Christ’s sake don’t let the blob talk! It ruins my suspension of disbelief. Besides I rather like the idea that a sophisticated society of blobs could rise up without the help of any kind of language at all. The key to remaking this game well would be to preserve exactly these kinds of details. A Boy and His Blob will ideally be today what it was when it was first released: charmingly preposterous.