Indie resurrections
Choice Provisions, of Bit.trip fame, just released their take on the chronically abused Bubsy franchise with
Bubsy: Paws on Fire.
Greg Johnson, who told me that he never acquiesced the ToeJam & Earl license, put out the shockingly competent
ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove earlier this year.
Chris Jones has done the same with our current Tex Murphy renaissance, and a small German collective called Assemble licensed the Leisure Suit Larry name from Codemasters for their 2018 take on the franchise:
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry.
And then there are the true homecomings, like Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman's Harebrained Schemes. The company lifts up Weisman's original tabletop creations, like Shadowrun and Battletech, which have spent the past decade-plus stuck in Microsoft limbo. Eventually, the two settled on some licensing deals, which, in Gitelman's words, has allowed him to pay penance for the 2007 Shadowrun arena shooter that was met with near-universal derision from fans.
But these licensing agreements often come with some serious qualifications. When Harebrained Schemes landed BattleTech, it was under the specific orders that they couldn't make a "real-time" mech game.
"[Microsoft] has to protect their IP. There's always going to be someone in Microsoft that says, 'I'm ready to make a new MechWarrior game.' And it never happens, it never gets close to being greenlit, but there's always someone sniffing around it," says Gitelman. "So the idea is just, 'We'll keep this for us, but you guys are great shepards for the IP, so we'll throw you this bone.' I don't mean that as negatively as it sounds."
Of course, the ignoble fates of some of these franchises make their fan-bases themselves extremely sensitive. (I mean, just think of the things that have happened to poor Bubsy over the years.) The best example of this might be Leisure Suit Larry, one of the most important mascots in the history of interactive entertainment, and also one who has been saddled with absolute dreck since the end of the adventure game era. Dennis Blumenthal, the marketing manager of Assemble and one of the heralds of Larry Laffer's reboot, learned that there is no easy way to satisfy a fanbase who's been through the ringer.
The team redrew our crusty protagonist into a younger, slightly-less-schlubby, slightly-less-'70s silhouette, and immediately weathered a typhoon of bereaved Al Lowe-disciples. Today, Blumenthal says the team is "way more cautious" when taking on an old, dead franchise.
"I worked with Calypso on Tropico 3 back in the day, so I have a little experience reviving brands, and it's always a rollercoaster to how fans react," says Blumenthal. "It's a great opportunity. I totally understand why so many publishers are not willing to take the risks of reviving old brands, because it can earn such a lot of hate. It can be really dangerous. It can also be very profitable."
The chance to right old wrongs, and recapture an ancient franchise in order and reupholster it for good, remains the primary draw. Dant Rambo, a producer at Choice Provisions, told me he secured the Bubsy license over a simple Twitter DM, and reiterates that
anything is possible when you can borrow the rights to a semi-iconic character after a single push notification.
I asked why a development team that has secured such a strong bulwark of fans with the Bit.trip games would want to take a swing at a character that's beat-up as much as Bubsy. He had the same answer I would if I suddenly found myself in charge of Glover today.
"I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Bubsy. I rented the original game constantly as a kid, in part because I liked it and in part because I absolutely could not beat it. It’s a very nostalgic series for me and I’m only just slightly embarrassed to admit how cool it is to me that I got to work on a Bubsy game," he says. "There’s also something about the longevity of the character that amuses me to no end. He has his fair share of earnest fans, but there are also people out there who seem baffled as to how he’s remained in the zeitgeist all these years. I love that we found a way to be a part of that."
This is the guiding light for Stephen Kick, as well. Nightdive exists as an eternal tribute to the entries in PC gaming folklore that might not necessarily be
great, but certainly deserve to be recognized nonetheless. Some of his favorite resuscitations are oddballs like Bad Mojo, a truly bizarre Windows 95 odyssey that features a cockroach attempting to reclaim his human soul. You have to be a very specific age, and of a very specific disposition, to demand Bad Mojo on modern machines.
Thankfully, people like Kick have a native understanding of those needs. As long as they're around, the right deals are slowly but surely being made.
"I grew up without consoles. I played a lot of weird stuff on the PC. I have the opportunity to go out and find the rights for these games and ensure that other people [can] get weirded out like I did," he says. "I realize that Bad Mojo didn't sell a million copies when it first came out, and it doesn't have a rabid fanbase, but I did it because I love that game. … One of the guiding philosophies of Nightdive is that regardless of what the game is, it deserves to be back out there."