Eli Hodapp
Hi, How Are You
It’s usually not hard to pick the games we write about on Touch Arcade. All it basically comes down to is finding games we like, either from the App Store or from the many prerelease games that get emailed to us. I’d really love to tell a story of some insane selection process, but there really isn’t one. The good games almost always clearly stand out from the pack, and it often doesn’t take much more than a few minutes of playing a game to determine that it’s cool enough to be worth spending more time on.
When Hi, How Are You hit the App Store, I grabbed it because the art style instantly caught my eye. It’s no secret that I am unnaturally drawn to strange games, especially after basically starting the Enviro-Bear 2010 revolution on Touch Arcade. Completely unaware of Daniel Johnston at the time, I played through the first few levels of the game trying to figure out if this was some clever parody of something else, or some other joke that was just going completely over my head— Especially with the opening of the game featuring very strong satanic overtones in a really strange almost comical art style.
Not really sure what to think of the game, I moved on to the other news of the day including the fantastic Baseball Superstars 2010, an Alive 4 Ever update, and Texas Tea, a game by a developer I met at GDC. By the time the terrible Family Guy game came out the next day, Hi, How Are You was already getting lost in the game clutter on my iPhone.
And there it sat for the next week or so, until I reached the point where the games I was installing were getting pushed off the last page of my iPhone, requiring a full device purge of things I’d either written about or played and didn’t like. (I’d love to say I’m more organized than this, but I’m really not.) When I made it to the screen with Hi, How Are You on it, the split second delete or keep decision eventually turned in to me powering through the rest of the game in one sitting.
Still not really sure what to think of the game, I decided to do some research on its development to turn up some kind of clue to explain what exactly it was that I just played through. A quick Google search later and I found myself falling head first down a Daniel Johnston rabbit hole that I wasn’t even aware existed.
Photo by Ray Pena
Now 48 years old, Daniel Johnston (above, center) has lived an absolutely amazing life documented in the movie The Devil and Daniel Johnston (available on iTunes and Netflix) which I somehow just had to watch after reading his Wikipedia article, even though it was about 3:00 AM by the time I made this discovery.
As I watched in amazement, it quickly became apparent that Hi, How Are You was Daniel Johnston’s life of art and music concentrated in to an iPhone game. An even stranger discovery out of all this was finding that Johnston doesn’t even have a cell phone, much less an iPhone. In fact, he doesn’t even have a phone. If you want to get in touch with him, you call his parents who live nearby.
The theme of the Hi, How Are You game, along with most of the music (which I also bought an embarrassing amount of during this whole Daniel Johnston discovery period) he created in his life was wrought with the obvious evidence of his intense bipolar disorder along with other serious issues in his life.
I wasn’t alone in being completely blown away by the works of Daniel Johnston. An immense number of bands and artists were influenced by Johnston, including Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain.
Photo by Kevin Mazur
What is beyond eerie is I remember this photo of Kurt Cobain and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers from all of the various memorials following Cobain’s death. His T-Shirt had absolutely no meaning to me, and I doubt I even noticed it at the time. But there is the Hi, How Are You frog, as clear as day.
Throughout everything I read about Johnston, all he ever wanted was to share and have others experience the music and art that he created. He started his career (if you’d even call it that) passing out cassette tapes he recorded to anyone willing to listen to them. The amazing part? Throughout most of his life he didn’t have access to equipment to duplicate these tapes, so each tape was recorded live and few were ever the same.
In a way, Hi, How Are You felt like one of these cassette tapes being passed off to me.
I try not to spend too much time thinking about it because it gets a little weird, but the things that the various iPhone sites pick up on can make the difference between a game gaining a foot hold in the wild west that is the App Store and becoming an iPhone development success story or falling in to obscurity amongst the tens of thousands of other games on the platform.
While I’m just picking out games that I think are cool, on the other end of the App Store is a developer sitting there with their fingers crossed hoping someone notices their game, that it gets featured, or something else to validate the immense time (and often monitory) investment in the project.
Hi, How Are You is the first iPhone game I found myself writing about not only because I thought it was fun, but because I wanted to do my small part in helping to fulfill Daniel’s dreams of sharing his art and music— A strange feeling to have over an iPhone game, as so many of them only serve as enjoyable distractions while waiting in line somewhere.
If you own an iPhone, give Hi, How Are You a shot and If you have time, watch The Devil and Daniel Johnston. While I can’t say for certain that they will have the same effect on you, I don’t like thinking that if it wasn’t for randomly stumbling across this video game I would have never discovered Daniel Johnston.
It really makes me wonder what else I’m missing.
