Bad Mojo Redux

Got Game Entertainment's December 2004 reissue of Pulse Entertainment's 1996 cult adventure Bad Mojo turns Roger Samms, an entomologist about to skip the country with stolen research grant money, into a literal cockroach. You scuttle through roughly 720 photographic screens of grime under a rundown San Francisco bar, with new fullscreen scaling, a documentary about the original production, and bonus content from director Vinny Carrella.

Setting and story

Roger is cursed by his late mother's locket and wakes up small, brown, and stranded in his own kitchen. The game's one location, the Bayou Bar and the warren of pipes and crawlspaces beneath it, is presented as a Kafka-flavored moral fable: to break the curse, the roach has to do enough good in the dark places of the building to redeem the man. The script borrows openly from The Metamorphosis and It's a Wonderful Life.

Gameplay

You steer the roach with the arrow keys across fixed top-down screens. Puzzles are environmental — push a sponge into a puddle to soak up poison, lure a spider with a struggling moth, ride a paper boat through sewer water — and you have four lives. Touching boric acid, rat traps, or the bar cat dumps you back at a checkpoint. There is no inventory and no dialogue; the entire game is the bug and the room.

Engine and technical changes

Pulse shot the backgrounds as live photographs of real surfaces — beer-soaked floorboards, mildewed pipe joints, scorched stovetops — then composited a CG roach over them. They used live German cockroaches with a professional cat trainer for reference footage. The Redux build is the same data set wrapped in a contemporary front end with patched fullscreen support, restored video, and Mac OS 9 compatibility.

Development and release

The original shipped through Acclaim on February 23, 1996 in North America and April 27 in the UK. Carrella later said "a pall hung over the production." Got Game Entertainment reissued the title as Bad Mojo Redux on December 9, 2004 in North America and June 8, 2007 in Europe, on hybrid Windows/Mac CD.

Reception and legacy

The 1996 release sold roughly 175,000 copies by February 1997 and earned warm reviews from PC Gamer and Macworld. The Redux took PC Gamer's Best Adventure Game 2004 award, an unusual honor for a near-decade-old title, and remains the canonical version for anyone trying to play Bad Mojo on hardware that postdates its first run.