Um Jammer Lammy

Lammy played guitar through every problem. When reality was impossible, she imagined a stage into existence around it.

Um Jammer Lammy arrived in 1999 as the successor to PaRappa the Rapper — sharing its paper-flat visual world, its rhythm mechanics, and its surrealist story logic, but built around a different protagonist and a different instrument. Where PaRappa was a dog who rapped his way through the challenges of becoming an adult, Lammy was a lamb who played electric guitar through challenges that grew increasingly disconnected from any recognizable reality. Masaya Matsuura, who designed PaRappa, built the 'imaginary world' mechanic into Lammy's structure explicitly. Lammy has performance anxiety. When she encounters a situation too difficult to face — a plane on fire, a concert stage that turns out to be in hell — she converts it in her mind into a scenario where performance is possible. The transformation is always into something where guitar-playing makes sense and the problem can be solved through music. The mechanic was Matsuura's acknowledgment that the rhythm game's conceit was always imaginary: the logic that says playing music correctly will solve any problem only works if you believe it fully. The game's sequel status put it in an unusual position: it was compared constantly to PaRappa, which it both resembled and exceeded in production value, while reaching an audience that was already satisfied by its predecessor. Um Jammer Lammy found a devoted following among players who wanted something stranger than PaRappa's lessons about growing up — and Lammy's problems, which included childbirth on a plane and a concert in the afterlife, were reliably stranger.