Frequently Asked Questions About Hop: The Movie

Q: Henry, what the fuck is this?

A: This is Hop: The Movie. Not to be confused with Hop (The Movie), a 2011 family comedy starring noted sex pest Russell Brand as creepy CGI rabbit E. B. (it's unclear what these letters stand for), the reluctant son and heir of the incumbent Easter Bunny, whose (E. B.'s) heart exists only for the drum kit. Brand acts opposite a particularly wide-eyed James Marsden as house-sitter Fred, who assists E. B. in crushing the workers' union attempting to overthrow his father's bunny monopoly of the easter season. Eventually, E. B. realises he should put his dreams on the backburner in favour of capital and ascends to the throne, joined by his notably not bunny friend Fred. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Anyway, this isn't that. This is Hop: The Movie a 2011 Nintendo DS game that (VERY) loosely adapts the events of the titular 'The Movie' (Hop) from Fred's perspective.


Q: Um. Alright. But, like, what is the game?

A: Hop: The Movie is a hybrid twin-stick shooter/minigame collection. Each of the four worlds are split into ten levels, with five twin-stick shooters and five minigames alternating between. The shooting (far and away the bulk of the ~2.5-3 hour runtime) is deeply meat-and-potatoes, with any and all puzzles/challenges involving nothing more than colour-coded barrels/shields (wherein you must switch to the appropriately coloured candy gun to destroy them). It is genuinely interesting to see how they deal with the challenge of constructing a twin-stick shooter on a console with no sticks, and it plays decently well with the stylus and d-pad, though the glacial pace of the whole thing is not exactly inspiring. The less said about the minigames, the better. You'll never want to go bowling again after this. However, the dollar store Grease Lightning they use to soundtrack two of the four rhythm minigames is kind of funny.

Q: Wait, there are bowling minigames in this? Dude, what the fuck? Tell me more!

A: That's not the next question

(Henry angrily points three or four times at the pristine sheet of laminated A4 paper placed delicately on the table in front of Q)

Q: Oh. Right. Um...How did you find out about this?

A: Through backloggd.com, of course! The page for this game on the site contained a simply infectious lack of information (Who made this? When did it come out? It's a twin-stick shooter? I must learn more!). My friend and I stumbled upon this full game playthrough, and after skipping around randomly, I was sold. Fred is shooting rabbits and baby chickens with a gun, there's a rhythm game somewhere, and cutscenes use the most brilliantly bit-crushed pngs of the character's faces to show who's talking at any point. Combined with this game being a vestigial property of what I've long decried as the worst commercially released American family film ever made, I just had to see it for myself.

Q: But why actually play it? You can see it's terrible from the footage! Why dedicate....what did you say? Two or three hours?! Why dedicate two or three hours of your life to this? That's longer than the fucking movie!

A: Because shovelware is so interesting when you consider it as something that people, living human beings, actually made. Because you glean so much about the circumstances of its creation (and its creators) by doing so. Because human hands moulded Hop: The Movie and I like to think about what they thought when they did.

Of course, this is cynical. It's a movie tie-in game rushed out to make a few bucks. Engine Software is a minor Dutch developer who has made a living making games like this for longer than most gamers have been alive. After decades of grinding them out, they got a bit of a break. They were tasked with porting Terraria to the 3DS. Come the late 2010s, traditional handhelds were falling out of favour, but they'd already found a lifeline in ports, which they've worked in ever since. They were closest to headlines when they released the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game remaster onto new-gen consoles in 2021. This is not a flashy back catalogue. These guys aren't making waves, but they've been around since the early 90s. They give Dutch developers a consistent line of work in a cutthroat industry. It's easy to point and laugh at how bad Hop: The Movie is, but sometimes, this kind of thing is the only way to make your dream job a reality.

Reading between the lines of the credits here is just as interesting. There's one (ONE!) person credited as a game designer here, who I'd assume had something of a leadership role among the handful of programmers and a second handful of additional artists and level designers. As an audio lead, David Vink had previously worked on games like Divinity II and The Blob! (a F2P progenitor of the actual De Blob series). It's likely Hop: The Movie was him trading in prestige for a chance to work more hands-on with game design itself. It's also notable that there are no credited writers. The game was released alongside the movie's release in theatres on April 1st 2011. It may surprise you to learn there's minimal publically available information surrounding the production of Hop (The Movie), but we do know it was first teased in early December of the previous year. Given an absolute best-case scenario of double that teaser-to-release time gap, these guys had no more than twelve months to create an entire video game from conception to delivery—a bland, cynical video game, of course. But a functioning one! Honestly, it's admirable how mechanically solid it is, given the overwhelming constraints it was made under. If I'd worked on this, I'd be thrilled it's as playable as it is. It's not bustling with creative spirit, and it's no great achievement, but it's workman-quality stuff and clearly not half-assed. Imagine how tempting it must be to half-ass Hop: The Movie for DS.

Q: Alright. Well, yeah, Henry, that is super duper interesting stuff. But I really need to get going now and, well, you know, it's getting pretty late and all, but I'll call you again we'll have to do this again sometime soon

(Q Begins briskly walking towards the front door)

A: Wait! I still need you to hear my four-hour seminar on Angry Birds E-

Q: Bye!

(The door slams shut)

A: I can't wait to tell them about the Sonic the Hedgehog suit for Chuck.