Skip to main content

Game from Community’s video game episode recreated by fans

communitys journey center hawkthorne recreated playable game
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The fate of NBC’s cult-favorite sitcom Community may be up in the air, but fans can console themselves with fact that Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne, the game in which most of season three’s “Digital Estate Planning” episode is set, is being recreated by devoted fans as an actual, playable game.

In the original episode, the gang played an impossibly elaborate game designed by Pierce’s bitter, racist father (and administered by guest star Giancarlo Esposito) as a test to earn his inheritance. The episode was chock full of lovingly specific references to video games from classics like The Legend of Zelda IIMyst and Mega Man to deeper cuts such as Battletoads and Blackthorne. It also contained nods to contemporary gaming trends, such as mining and a crafting system.

Soon after the episode aired, Redditor Derferman built and shared the foundation of a playable version. Two years of steady work later, the now-thriving open source team working on the game has released version 0.9.0 and it looks fantastic. In addition to faithfully recreating the content of the game itself, fans have also filled it with in-jokes and references to the rest of the series, such as alternate avatars based on the show’s Halloween and genre-parody episodes.

You can follow the game’s progress and find the latest build on its website or subreddit, and if you want to get involved yourself the source code is up on GitHub.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
Here are our favorite video games of 2020, from Animal Crossing to Hades
Animal Crossing New Horizons Beach

The Digital Trends team named The Last of Us Part II our game of the year for 2020. In our post detailing why, we noted that it was a contentious debate. That's because 2020 was filled with gaming highlights, big and small. Major studios rolled out a slate of high-budget games that sent the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One off with a bang, while welcoming their new iterations in style. Nintendo had a slow year, but delivered the only exclusive that mattered in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Despite COVID-19 related delays, which seemed to jumble up plans left and right, there were no shortage of big-budget hits.

Other success stories came out of left field. Among Us returned from obscurity to become a multiplayer sensation two years later. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout spun the battle royale genre on its head and had brands clamoring for a piece of its pie. Blaseball, a minimalist baseball simulator, took the internet by storm and gained attention from unlikely places like The Paris Review and NPR. It felt like there was a wild story like this every month as gamers looked for creative ways to connect with one another in an all-digital era. We've put together a list of some of our favorite games of this year that paints a well-rounded picture of the video game climate in 2020.
Best Adventure Game: The Last of Us Part II

Read more
Rayman creator Michel Ancel retires from video games
10 characters we want super smash bros for switch raymansmash

Video game legend Michel Ancel, who created the Raymanfranchise and Beyond Good and Evil, announced that he is retiring from the video game industry. The designer says that he's moving on to work on a wildlife sanctuary.

Ancel was working on Beyond Good and Evil 2 and a new game called Wild. In an Instagram post announcing his retirement, Ancel says that both projects will continue without him.

Read more
Conan O’Brien ascends from Clueless Gamer to cameo in Death Stranding video game
death stranding conan obrien cameo

Conan O'Brien is no stranger to video games, having hosted his Clueless Gamer series for years as part of his talk show. Now, things are getting kicked up a notch, as O'Brien has been made into a character that makes a cameo in Hideo Kojima's long-in-development Death Stranding.

The revelation came in a new video highlight on Conan, O'Brien's TBS show, where O'Brien was given the chance to meet with Kojima. After accessing the building via a Costco card and viewing Kojima's toy collection, Conan blurred out the entirety of the office, including Kojima himself, with the sole exception of a coat rack.

Read more