Two Virtual Dolphins Save our Planet

Jupiter & Mars

By Marie Kjellsdotter. Images: Tigertron

James Mielke and Sam Kennedy have created a beautifully surreal virtual underwater universe that examines the consequences of real-world issues of climate change and humanity’s lasting impact on the environment.

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 devastating effects of climate change. Sea levels have risen as a result of melting polar ice, and large coastal cities have sunk beneath the waves. The ocean, with its neon-coloured fish and coral reefs, is thriving once again amidst the graveyards of sunken steel and cement ruins – remnants left behind by people.

The game’s main characters, the dolphins Jupiter and her companion Mars, have been sought out by an ancient race of ocean sentinels (whales) called ‘The Elders,’ who watch over the seven seas and communicate with each other around the world. They enlist Jupiter and Mars to venture out into troubled areas of the oceans and neutralise a global network of acoustic harassment devices (AHDs) that repel marine life from man-made areas. The dolphins navigate through the oceans and explore five distinct ‘biomes’, such as tropical and East Asian islands, and sunken underwater cities based on real-world areas like Mykonos, London, and New York City, to solve a series of larger-than-life missions. James and Sam want the game to entertain first and foremost, but also hope that it will awaken peoples’ interest and encourage them to seek more information about how our planet is affected by climate change. Interested in playing? Jupiter & Mars is designed for all age ranges, and is available for PlayStation 4 as well as PlayStation VR.

TIGERTRON. An independent, New York-based gaming development company that creates games that raise awareness of our planet’s environmental and nature issues.

JUPITER & MARS. The game where dolphins Jupiter and her companion Mars navigate around in a surreal, future underwater environment, to save our planet.

GAMING CONSOLES. The Jupiter & Mars video game is compatible with gaming consoles PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR.

THE COVE. A documentary about dolphin slaughter in a bay outside of Taiji in Japan. You can watch the film on YouTube.