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RETRO GAMES ARE BIG BUSINESS BUT WHICH TITLES SHOULD BE RESURRECTED?
N OSTALGIA is big business. It’s partly why we see games being remastered for new consoles, publishers hoping to cash in on players’ sentimentality, and capture the younger market along the way.
And it works. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy hit the PS4 in June 2017, with a PC and XBOX release following a year later. The title is a compilation of remasters of the first three games in the Crash Bandicoot series, all developed and released in the 1990s.
By February this year, the game had sold more then 10 million copies.
And it’s not just games that are being reissued, it’s consoles too.
Nintendo’s mini version of the NES was released in November 2016, a compact version of the much-loved system which first appeared 30 years earlier.
The NES Classic came pre-loaded with 30 Nintendo games, and it sold out immediately. Demand was so high Nintendo even put the console back into production last year.
There’s been a mini PlayStation classic, a Super NES Classic, a Sega Mega Drive – which goes on sale in September, and the C64 mini – a frankly adorable compact version of the Commodore 64.
The latest mini console heading our way is a PC Engine Mini, or the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini , as it will be called in the UK.
Originally released by Konami as a rival to the NES, the TurboGrafx-16 had a very limited release in Europe, but enjoyed huge success in Japan – more so than the MegaDrive.
It will come pre-loaded with 50 games, and here’s the reason to get excited. Due to its small UK sales in the 80s, a lot of the games on this console will be available to UK gamers for the first time.
There’s no price as of yet, but will only be available through Amazon.
It won’t be on sale until March 2020, but among the games will be rare Hideo Kojima game Snatcher, in its original Japanese form, and the classic RPG Ys I & II.
And while this is all very exciting news, there’s still a couple of miniature heroes I’d like to see sat back under my telly...
Sega Dreamcast , sadly Sega’s final console, was such a commercial flop the company pretty much gave up on hardware. But the thing is, the Dreamcast was simply the best thing about gaming in the early 2000s.
With launch titles like Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, and Power Stone, it should have hit the ground running. But with EA’s reluctance to release games on it, other developers followed suit.
Starting life in Japan in 1998, the Dreamcast was officially discontinued on March 31, 2001. In total, 9.13 million Dreamcast consoles were sold worldwide – its star burnt bright for a very short time.
But the release of a Dreamcast mini could be redemption for the console.
Among the titles that could be bundled with it should be Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Virtual Tennis, REZ, Unreal Tournament, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Sega Rally Championship 2.
While Nintendo is on a run of issuing mini consoles, how about a Classic 64? Quite apart from the fact I loved the game cartridges, the N64 was responsible for me losing an entire Bank holiday weekend to Goldeneye.
The first Nintendo console that had any real competition, the N64 held its own in the mid-90s against Sega’s Mega Drive and Sony’s new PlayStation.
A wishlist of games to appear on a theoretical mini console would be Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, 1080° Snowboarding, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and Banjo-Kazooie.
Is there anything I’ve missed? Any glaring oversights for consoles that should be resurrected? Email cheryl. mullin@reachplc.com, or tweet me: @cezmullin.