game's release, Mega ranked it the 13th best Sega Genesis game in its All-Time Top 100 feature. The magazine praised the game's "superbly manic and zany action" and deemed it both "original and insane". The Channel 4 video game programme GamesMaster gave the game a 70% rating.ToeJam & Earl was re-released on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console in 2006. Official Nintendo Magazine scored the game 85% and praised its humor, originality and two-player mode. However, the reviewer believed that the game's enjoyability had diminished with time. GameSpot felt that the game's 1990s idioms were dated, but that the gameplay—particularly the two-player mode—was still enjoyable by modern standards. Jeremy Parish of 1UP found the game's two-player co-operative mode more enjoyable than its single-player and described the graphics and sound as "oddly primitive". Parish considered it "one of the best games to hit VC to date". Eurogamer's reviewer negatively received the game and believed its gameplay to be unsatisfying and overly slow. IGN called the game's visuals a "mixed bag" and derided the slow pace, but praised its unpredictability and believed that its sound design was "one thing you absolutely can't fault". Legacy ToeJam and Earl became one of Sega's second tier mascots, alongside Sonic, and one of the Sega Genesis's key exclusive franchises. The characters appeared in a spin-off light gun game, Ready, Aim, Tomatoes, developed by Johnson Voorsanger Productions as one of six mini-games for the Menacer 6-game cartridge. In early 1992, the developers began work on a sequel to ToeJam & Earl and spent three months expanding on the original game's concept by adding indoor areas and more terrain types. Sega was not impressed by the sequel and believed it to be unmarketable. The team redesigned it as a platform game, as Sega were inclined to publish games in this genre. The game, titled ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, was highly anticipated, and it was a commercial and critical success when it released in 1993. However, fans of the original game were disappointed by the change in design to a perceived generic style. Due to poor relations between Johnson Voorsanger Productions and Sega, which held the ToeJam & Earl rights until 1995, the ToeJam & Earl franchise was neglected. A ToeJam & Earl game planned for the Dreamcast was cancelled (a beta of the game was preserved and, on Christmas Day 2013, released on the internet by