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Monday, September 28, 2009

News Devil, Daniel Johnston... and an iPhone App?

Posted by Andrew R Tonry on Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 5:08 PM

That's right:

...(Mr. Johnston) 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. (To reach him you have to call his father, next door, who summons Mr. Johnston via intercom.)

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...

Reached at his father’s house recently after he had returned from a concert tour in the Midwest, Mr. Johnston did not seem to remember much about the game or having played it. Asked what he thought of his work serving as the basis for a video game, he sighed and said, “Just another milestone in Daniel Johnston history, I guess.”

But he added that he had come of age when a video game was played with a joystick, on a television screen, usually one encased in a large wooden box with slots for quarters. “If they make it into a real video game, it might work out, I guess,” he said. “I don’t even know what an iPhone is.”

And there you have it.