Earthworm Jim diorama

I’m not sure I ever actually owned the full version of Earthworm Jim. Back in the early 90s, shareware really was the big thing – much like today’s “freemium games” on mobile platforms; the idea was to get as many people as possible playing a game, then sell them the full hit once they were hooked.

Back then the internet was in its infancy. Games were shared by passing around floppy disks (often garnered off the front of PC magazines).

But one thing I do remember is that Earthworm Jim featured cows. They were everywhere. And one famous sequence was to get past a cow to complete one of the early levels.

One of the most memorable scenes (for me) in the game was to place a branch under a cow, then drop a fridge on the branch, to fire the cow into the air, in order to pass.

It was this scene that I decided to recreate with my diorama.

I wanted to create the scene as closely as possible. So loaded the screenshot into Inkscape and traced the platform shapes (adding in extra material where the platform was obscured by onscreen objects).

I then exported these shapes as .dxf and sent them to the laser cutter, to cut the shapes out of some 2mm mdf.

Then a quick spray with some white primer, and I added them to a couple of blocks of polystyrene, to create the “rock faces” that appeared in the game.

The end result?

Well, the mdf actually looked quite nice.

But the rest of it? Shocking. Absolutely awful.

It just looked like some mdf glued to some mis-shapes of polystyrene. Which, to be fair, is exactly what is was. But it was dreadful.

So went in the bin. This was going to need a bit more thought….