Revisiting Jill of the Jungle, the last game Tim Sweeney designed

Boy, was 1992 a different time for computer games. Epic MegaGames’ Jill of the Jungle illustrates that as well as any other title from the era. Designed and programmed by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, the game was meant to prove that console-style games of the original Nintendo era could work just as well on PCs. (Later, the onus of proof would often be in the reverse direction.)

Also, it had a female protagonist, which Sweeney saw as a notable differentiator at the time. That’s pretty wild to think about in an era of Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft, Horizon Forbidden West‘s Aloy, Life is Strange‘s Max Caulfield, Returnal‘s Selene Vassos, Control‘s Jesse Faden, The Last of Us‘ Ellie Williams, and a seemingly endless list of others—to say nothing of the fact that many players of all genders who played the games Mass Effect and Cyberpunk 2077 seem to agree that the female protagonist options in those are more compelling than their male alternatives.

As wacky as it is to remember that the idea of a female character was seen as exceptional at any point (and with the acknowledgement that this game was nonetheless not the first to do that), it’s still neat to see how forward-thinking Sweeney was in many respects—and not just in terms of cultural norms in gaming.

Gameplay to stand the test of time

Having been born in the early 80s to a computer programmer father, I grew up on MS-DOS games the way many kids did on Atari, Nintendo, or PlayStation. Even I’ll admit that, as much as I enjoyed the DOS platformers, they don’t hold up very well against their console counterparts. (Other genres are another story, of course.)

I know this is blasphemy for some of my background and persuasion, but Commander Keen‘s weird, floaty controls are frustrating, and what today’s designers call the “game feel” just isn’t quite right.

Too many platformer games on PC in the ’80s and ’90s were frustrating to play, and they offered very little ammunition for a PC user to use in an argument with a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) owner to convince them that PC that costs thousands of dollars is better for those types of games than the much-cheaper consoles; there were both technical and cultural reasons for this

With Jill of the Jungle, Sweeney was one of the first to give PC players that ammunition.

I replayed the entire trilogy of episodes, which is bundled into one package on GOG, in one afternoon recently. It was fun as hell. The movement and jumping are as responsive as you want them to be, and the level design is ingeniously creative. It ramps up in difficulty across the episodes at an appropriate pace, but it’s never unfairly frustrating.

Even the graphics have aged decently well. Yeah, they look retro—but in the fun, nostalgic way Super Nintendo games look retro as they’re rediscovered by new generations, not in the “look, you had to be there” way that a lot of its PC platformer peers do.

An artifact of historical relevance

Tim Sweeney, who founded Potomac Computer Systems turned Epic MegaGames turned Epic Games, is obviously a looming figure in the technology, gaming, and entertainment industries today. His company’s Unreal Engine is the default choice for AA and AAA game developers who want a ready-made game engine, and it’s widely used in Hollywood productions like Disney’s The Mandalorian, too.

Fortnite, the flagship game of Unreal Engine, is one of the most popular games in history, and was one of the main drivers of the tech industry’s obsession with the “metaverse” in the early 2020s. To this day, major gaming publishers are trying (and largely failing) to copy Fortnite‘s success.