PURPLE REIGN
We take a closer look at Spyro Reignited Trilogy and discover how the little purple dragon is going to set your world ablaze once again
After Crash Bandicoot’s remastered PlayStation adventures, everyone kept asking Activision: “When’s Spyro The Dragon getting his PS1 games remastered?” Now, after much hoping and speculating, we now have a definite answer: 21 September. Yes, that is pleasantly exact. But it’s also exciting, not only because the Crash remasters show that old games in modern clothes can look absolutely beautiful, but because Spyro’s less precisionheavy gameplay is likely to stand the test of time better than the bandicoot’s did. This Reignited Trilogy could be legitimately awesome, even by today’s standards. Indeed, first impressions suggest this is going to be a proper scorcher, and the perfect way to mark the plucky little dragon’s 20th birthday.
The package is deliciously old-school, set to feature the first three classic games in the series: Spyro The Dragon, Spyro 2: Gateway To Glimmer (known as Ripto’s Rage in the US), and Spyro: Year Of The Dragon, giving us 100 old levels all freshly dressed up in HD. But we’re not just talking about native HD rendering of the old games, even though Activision is calling it “up-scaled”. That’s actually just an excuse for an officially-sanctioned dragon pun, and you don’t see many of those, so let’s roll with it. What it should really say is “completely redrawn” for PS4, meaning we’re getting blow-for-blow remakes, with items, gems and enemies all appearing exactly where they were the first time round.
FOR THE LOVE OF BOB
Development duties have gone to Toys For Bob, which is familiar with Spyro, having created the Skylanders games. Its devs declared the project “a dream to work on”. Not that it’s a simple process, by any means. Without direct access to the original’s development files, the devs were forced to develop their own tool, appropriately
named ‘Spyro-scope’, which reverse-engineered the code and allowed them to unlock the ‘mesh’ of the original games and see exactly where enemies and the paths on which they roamed were set, enabling them to rebuild the worlds exactly as players will remember them from the late 1990s.
But some things can’t just be remade from scratch, namely the voices of the characters. In order to make Spyro as familiar and authentic as possible, his voice actor, Tom Kenny is back, rerecording his dialogue from the second and third games, but now also voicing Spyro in the original game for the first time. Kenny is quite the vocal star now, having since enjoyed considerable exposure as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, so if SpongeBob flashes into your mind while you’re playing Spyro, now you know why.
Carlos Alazraqui, on the other hand, who voiced Spyro in the original Spyro The Dragon, will not be making a return. That’s a shame, especially as these days he’s still making YouTube videos in Spyro’s voice about how you should keep your collectible Spyro games on a Fancy a sneak peek into the production of Spyro Reignited Trilogy? Then check out the hashtag #ArtOfReignited on Twitter, which is being populated by developer Toys For Bob. While we haven’t seen the big baddies yet in any gameplay footage, it’s nice to see Ripto’s Dracula-esque collar is still ridiculously oversized if the official art is anything to go by. Good work, all concerned!
“ACTOR TOM KENNY IS BACK, VOICING SPYRO IN THE ORIGINAL GAME FOR THE FIRST TIME.”