Originally posted September of last year.

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Pictured: Safest children's toy in the universe.

Ha ha, me and a friend were talking about this boss on Skype and we both ended up drawing him.

I had a random epiphany that I haven't really drawn any recent Rareware game fanart even though those games pretty much shaped me into the person I am today so I threw together something pretty quick in honor of one of my favorite games as a child, Donkey Kong 64.

...even if I never actually completed this game 100%. I think my file still sits somewhere in the 92% range because even I cannot fathom some of those banana challenges. (and it doesn't help that one of the bananas in Gloomy Galleon is actually glitched to be impossible if you do a certain thing before it...)

Not gonna lie - this remains one of my favorite designs of a videogame boss period. It's just so appealing in ways I cannot describe.

I actually took some liberties with his design and made him more, for the lack of a better term, organic. Even as a kid, I never really saw Mad Jack as a sentient toy but rather some sort of guy who made himself into a toy. His mouth is pink, drooly, and has non-mechanical teeth, he has a more developed personality than all of the robot monsters in that level, he uses magic to make himself gigantic, and therefore I always took him to be the guy who runs Frantic Factory.

I still do, actually. It's fun to picture Mad Jack starting off as just Jack, some guy (well, Kremling...duck. Hybrid?) who makes radically unsafe toys that chew off his limbs whose repeated failures drive him down the road of insanity and, after enlisting the Kremling army, greet intruders with a little game called "Hit the right button or I murder you with fireballs" while showing off his duck impersonations. That's a lot more fun than just going "Well, he's a toy...that was rejected. Also he sounds like a duck."