Gaming
Games
The Classic Games Getting Spiritual Sequels
The follow ups to gaming classics with everything but the naming rights to look forward to.
Meet Ecco the Dolphin from Little Blue
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Often it seems like all we get are endless video game sequels, from countless Assassin’s Creed spin-offs to annual FIFAupdates - but they're not always the ones we actually want.
Sometimes, cult games just don’t sell well enough to merit the investment in a sequel. Sometimes, a game’s creator wants to move onto something new. Sometimes though, the rights to a name have simply slipped out of his or her hands. That’s just how business works sometimes, but it’s not stopping some of gaming’s greatest auteurs.
With nothing but elbow grease and a little help from sites like Kickstarter, they’re bringing back some of yesteryear’s classics in all but name. Here are just a few of them to look forward to.
Little Blue
Ed Annunziata is far from a household name, but he’s the man you can thank for the legendary Ecco The Dolphin series of serene, head scratching puzzle platformers back in the days of the Mega Drive. Now he’s back with a new spiritual sequel to the series, Little Blue, and it’s the only famous fictional bottlenose that’s not coming with him. Most of the original Ecco development team is still on board, as well as one of the designers who worked on the original Star Wars films.
Set a million years in the future, we’re back in the familiar underwater setting, revamped in 3D and HD - and it looks nothing short of beautiful. Little Blue’s actually a stepping stone to a much more ambitious project, The Big Blue, which failed to meet its funding on Kickstarter recently: it’ll be made available to play for free, in the hopes that backers will then fund the entire adventure. Here’s hoping.
Shadow Of The Eternals
Super scary Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was one of the freakiest, most loved games on the Nintendo GameCube, but a sequel never happened: developer Silicon Knights has run into serious legal troubles in recent years. Many of its laid-off employees have reformed as Precursor Games, and they’re working on a spiritual successor, Shadow Of The Eternals, a twelve part series of games for the Nintendo Wii U and PC that pits you against - what else - an eternal beast trying to bring an end to life as we know it.
Eternal Darkness wasn’t your usual fright-fest - instead, the game would play with your mind, breaking the fourth wall by pretending to delete your save files or turn off the TV screen - and we’re hoping for more twisted mind games this time around too. The team are still raising funds on Kickstarter, so if you want to help, be sure to chip in.
War For The Overworld
Dungeon Keeper is one of the most fondly remembered games of the 90s, a hilarious black strategy game about an evil anti-hero building up and protecting his underworld domain from heroes. It’s begging to be remade, but there’s a problem: the studio that made it, Bullfrog Productions, is long gone.
Enter the team at Brighton-based Subterranean Games, who are picking up the baton with War For The Overworld, a strategy/god game that they say is part Dungeon Keeper, part StarCraft.
Though it lacks the Dungeon Keeper licence, they’ve still got the thumbs up from the Bullfrog veterans. "Dungeon Keeper has to be remade. It has to be remade by people who love it and the Kickstarter campaign for War For The Overworld is the campaign to support if you want to see Dungeon Keeper back,” Dungeon Keeper creator Peter Molyneux told backers late last year in a video message. Seals of approval don’t get much more official looking than that.
Earlier this year, Subterranean Games battered its Kickstarter goal of £150,000 to developer War For The Overworld, so it’s very much on: look out for the game when it arrives on 30 August.
Project Eternity
Like Precursor Games, Obsidian Entertainment was born from the ashes of another studio, Black Isle Studios, the developer responsible for the original, classic Fallout RPGs and Planescape: Torment. The team there have made a name for themselves over the last decade with 3D adventures like Fallout: New Vegas and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II, but with Project Eternity, the team are kicking it old-school, isometric style once more.
The upcoming RPG is a return to Black Isle’s roots: a fantasy RPG with more than a t hint of Baldur’s Gate, which the team also worked on, about it, but bigger and better for 2014. With a war chest of $4m (£2.6m) raised through crowdfunding, we can’t wait to see what they can pull off.
BioShock
The hit game BioShock
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It’s not an upcoming game, but 2007’s BioShock is the perfect example of a spiritual successor going on to bigger and even better things. Ken Levine, who oversaw the sequel to Warren Spector’s legendary space adventure System Shock, picked up where he left off a decade later with the original BioShock, a first person shooter-slash-psychological thriller set in a creepy, failed underwater utopia.
It wasn’t a direct sequel, but the hallmarks, including a twisted storyline about a failed society were all there, and at the time, Levine was keen to stress the connection. Since then, of course, BioShock’s become a blockbuster franchise in its own right, with two sequels, including this year’s BioShock Infinite, which debuted to ecstatic reviews, including perfect tens from some of the most influential games magazines and news sites.
