Jimothy, the short-spined raccoon who became an internet sensation in Seattle this month, now has a free video game built in the style of a late-1980s NES cartridge.
Tech entrepreneur Chris Pirillo published a four-mission game named after the raccoon on July 19, casting Jimothy in a set of scenarios lifted from his actual nightly routine. It runs in a browser on desktop or mobile, renders at the NES resolution of 256×240 with a hardware-accurate palette, and generates its entire chiptune soundtrack live through a 2A03-style synth rather than playing back audio files.
Each mission uses a different genre and camera angle. Trash Night is a side-view scramble to rummage bins before the garbage truck arrives, with two dogs patrolling the alley and latched lids that cannot be opened. Get Across Easy Street is Frogger relocated to Ballard, five blocks of streets, yards, and sprinklers that never repeat the same layout twice. Paparazzi is top-down night stealth in which standing perfectly still renders Jimothy almost invisible, and five photographs end the run. The Big Climb, a vertical ascent up crumbling ledges and garden trellises, stays padlocked until the first three are cleared. Players get five lives per mission, and clearing all four unlocks an ending.
The difficulty is deliberately gentle, drawing on several classic running and platform games rather than trying to test anyone. Pirillo said the idea arrived on a Saturday afternoon after his feeds filled with Jimothy fan art. A Settings toggle switches from Basic to Advanced, which raises the Trash Night quota from eight to ten, cuts that clock from 56 seconds to 46, speeds up the traffic and the dogs, and narrows the ledges on the final climb. The two modes keep separate hi-score tables.
Pirillo built the whole thing as a single HTML page over the weekend, and said the turnaround itself was the point. “I remember when every big moment had a video game. But by the time a studio could create a video game around a meme pre-AI, the meme’s energy would have dissipated,” he said.
Studios have been circling the same moment from the other direction. The Sims posted an in-game interpretation on July 20, Warner Bros. Games followed on July 21 with an image placing Jimothy in Gotham City, and the Dungeons & Dragons account marked the same day with a post of its own.
Wizards of the Coast went further than a social post. The publisher issued an official stat block for the raccoon, titled Beloved Cryptid, with a Compact Frame trait that lets him squeeze through gaps under four inches wide and a ranged Hurl Garbage attack. The teams behind Cult of the Lamb, World of Warcraft, Old School RuneScape, Dead by Daylight, and Among Us have all published artwork rendering him in their own house styles.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire drew Jimothy in the 1930s rubber hose film noir style the game is built around, a fit that works better than most of the crossovers.
Four missions run about twenty minutes for anyone who is not chasing hi-scores. The nearest neighbors are Pirillo’s own arcade, which hosts Chicken, 8-Bit Battle Tanks, and Crow’s Cache in the same browser-native format. Anyone who wants the same instant-loading running game format with a far steeper skill ceiling can move on to Run 3, the 2014 tunnel runner from developer Joseph Cloutier, which trades Jimothy’s running from people and cars for running and avoiding holes in space while gravity shifts as you turn.
Pirillo’s game closes on a note most fan tributes skip. Its instruction manual carries a section on raccoon coexistence alongside the control list, relaying Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife guidance on securing garbage and feeding pets indoors. “This game is as close as any of us should ever get to him,” the site states.
