George: Everybody’s doing something, we’ll do nothing.
Jerry: So, we go into NBC, we tell them we’ve got an idea for a show about nothing.
George: Exactly.
Jerry: They say, “What’s your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”
George: There you go.
Jerry: I think you may have something here.
Jacob Janerka and Ivan Dixon probably weren’t sitting around a coffee shop like Jerry and George when they came up with the idea for a point-and-click adventure game based on Seinfeld, but their version of “The Pitch” sounds equally hilarious.
The two developers are looking to do more than build a mere fangame with Seinfeld Adventure, and so they’ve launched SeinfeldGame.com to pitch the idea directly to co-creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David:
For a “show about nothing” Seinfeld has a surprisingly rich world. There are so many memorable recurring characters, plot lines and locations as the four protagonists navigate new relationships, jobs and rivals.
The show existed during the time of iconic adventure games such as Monkey Island, Full Throttle, King’s Quest and many more.
Point-and-click adventure games often involve some sort of task or mission that requires a mix of conversational skills, puzzle solving, item collection and use. In Seinfeld, conflict also arises regularly from miscommunication or involves novel items (think episodes like The Pez, The Junior Mint, The Statue, The Calzone, The Fusilli Jerry, The Couch, The Big Salad, etc). All this melds perfectly with the point-and-click formula!
Their “Video Game About Nothing” would give players the chance to control Jerry, George, and Elaine as they live out a brand new episode (“The Email”) that also ropes in Kramer (a “wild card” who “cannot be controlled”), Newman, Kenny Bania, and yet another tale about a young girl’s strange and erotic journey from Milan to Minsk:
Jerry is dating a publicist who accidentally reveals his email address to Kenny Bania through a group email. Now Bania fills Jerry’s inbox with a flurry of spam emails asking for feedback on his new stand-up set. Jerry decides to break up with the publicist over this, but he doesn’t want to deal with the interaction face-to-face. Kramer suggests ending the relationship via email and avoiding it all together. Jerry does this before Elaine reminds him that the publicist was supposed to get them all tickets to the opening night of the new movie “Rochelle, Rochelle 2”. George devises a plan to corrupt Jerry’s girlfriend’s computer before she can read her emails so that they can still collect the tickets. Kramer says he knows who can help. Someone with a sworn vendetta against email. Someone who has devoted their whole life to analogue mail and sees email as a threat to his livelihood. Someone named Newman.
While Jerry’s Mac often sat unused in the corner of his apartment, this certainly sounds like the plot of a long lost episode of Seinfeld. Ideally, Janerka and Dixon would like to include multiple episodes in the game, with each one built around the three-act structure of the show.
But that’s where the rest of us come in. Right now, Seinfeld Adventure is just a website, a short proof-of-concept trailer, and a good idea. While they’ve already rereated Jerry’s apartment and the coffee shop in a wonderfully pixelated style (and perfectly captured the shove accompanying Elaine’s “Get! Out!”), they need the approval of the show’s creators before they can go any further. And they think they might have a better shot if fans share their idea “far and wide.”
I don’t know what’ll happen next, but hopefully it goes better for Janerka and Dixon than it did for Jerry and George.
