D O L P H I N S S AV E O U R P L A N E T
T WO V I R T U A L D O L P H I N S S AV E O U R P L A N E T
J U PI T E R & M A R S Ja mes M iel ke a nd Sa m Ken nedy have created a beauti f u l ly sur rea l v ir t ua l under water un iverse t hat exa m i nes t he consequences of rea l-world issues of cl i mate cha nge a nd hu ma n it y’s lasti ng i mpact on t he env iron ment.
BY MARIE KJELLSDOTTER
IMAGES: TIGERTRON
The idea for ‘Jupiter & Mars’ began to take shape after James watched ‘The Cove’, a 2009 documentary about dolphin hunting in the small town of Taiji, Japan. There, thousands of dolphins are slaughtered in September each year because they didn’t make the grade as ’perfect’ dolphins for the world’s zoos – an almost equally terrible fate for a dolphin. James, deeply moved by the film explains, “I started thinking, couldn’t I do something better with my time than just making more games for yet another generation of gaming consoles?” And so he did. In 2016, friends and game development veterans James Mielke and Sam Kennedy founded the independent, New York-based gaming development studio Tigertron, with the goal of raising awareness of the world’s environmental and climate issues through video game experiences. The thinking is with video games being a proactive, interactive medium, it would be easier to ‘speak’ to the game playing audience (PlayStation 4 has 100 million users alone) than a typical documentary might. Jupiter & Mars is an evocative underwater adventure that unfolds in the distant future, after humanity has vanished from the planet, leaving the Earth and its creatures to recover from the devas138
SAM KENNEDY and JAMES MIELKE, founders of the New York-based game development company Tigertron, and the creators behind the video game Jupiter & Mars.