EA Looking Into Reviving Classic Games?

Gamasutra reports that Electronic Arts has filed for trademarks on several popular old franchises: Populous, Wing Commander, Theme Park, and Road Rash. This, along with comments from Harvey Elliot of EA's Bright Light Studio, have led many to suspect that we may see new titles for those IPs in the near future. Elliot said, "If you remember all the old classics you played, if you go back and play them now, they're not the same. They were right for their time, and the trick with those games is coming up with what's right for the time now. I'm going to look at them at some point; I think there's an opportunity to bring those back in the future, but only if it's right for the time and not just a 'remake' or something. We'd need to do it in a way that's true to the original values, but would still make a great game today."

Comments

Theme Hospital 2

[omgarthas]

pretty please....

Re:Theme Hospital 2

[RogueyWon]

Are you telling me a 50 bugs price tag is too high to watch people suffer from both Bloaty Head and The Squits at the same time in high definition 3d?

Heathen.

Re:Theme Hospital 2

[darthvader100]

50 bugs price tag

50 bugs?
Any restriction on what breed they have to be?
Do ants count?

What a novel way to pay for your games. I can now afford *millions* of games

Re:Theme Hospital 2

[abcjared]

There is an open source Theme Hospital in progress, OpenTH

Or...

[ledow]

Or, they are just renewing their trademarks? Or they are planning to pump some old stuff out through Steam, etc.?

Why does "trademark application" have to equal "writing a sequel"?

Re:Or...

[bertoelcon]

As far as I am concerned, the more stuff that gets pumped out through STEAM, the better. I pretty much refuse to buy games these days unless its through STEAM, because I am afraid that I will lose the discs or CD-Keys but STEAM will likely at least outlive my game-playing days.

But if STEAM does fall you get screwed over backwards. I can't believe that people that hate drm so much love STEAM, because its still a form of drm.

Sequels

[Carra]

Just what we need, more sequels... They'd better just rerelease the old classics or give them new graphics and rerelease them like Lucasarts did. Nothing wrong with a good remake, lots of people never played the originals.

Re:Sequels

[Delkster]

I'm particularly sceptical about sequels to titles like Populous which were originally interesting because they did something that was a pretty new concept in games at the time: in Populous, for example, it was the modeling of behaviour of relatively large populations, and giving the player seemingly great powers to drive those. (SimCity did something similar in that sense at around the same time, but I don't know of many other mainstream games that did.) Many of these games relied pretty heavily just on those novel ideas.

If you tried to make a new game now based on the same idea, it wouldn't be novel or exciting anymore. You'd have to make up a new and different concept in order to achieve a similar "wow" effect, but if it's going to be based on an entirely new concept and idea, why would you call it with the same name as an older title with a different concept, except for marketing purposes? That's a paradox -- you can't both be novel and retain the old idea. The only way it would make sense would be to use the original concept and develop it further so that it brings in an additional concept that is compatible with the original spirit but still novel enough *today* that it brings a new "wow" effect. I'm sure that's not impossible, but it's rarely seen, and probably rarely in the mind of people thinking up sequels.

I've seen really good sequels. System Shock 2 comes to mind, as do Civilization games. These sequels did exactly that: took parts of what was central to the spirit of the original games and built a game on top of it that brought in something else that made the combination interesting.

On the other hand, Populous 3 wasn't particularly interesting, IMHO, probably because it didn't have any particularly novel ideas anymore. It just shared the name and a loosely connected background story, neither of which made the original games interesting.

So what's the yay factor?

[RogueyWon]

Let's assume that in each case, we're talking about a bona-fide sequel or franchise reboot, rather than just a port of the original to Steam/Xbox Live/PSN. Just how much of a gap in the market is there for the games named in the summary?

Populous: This might work. However, the god-game genre has been through quite a few evolutionary steps since Populous kicked things off. I think a game that stuck too closely to the formula of the original (or Populous 2) would feel a bit dated and lacklustre now. A new installment in the series would need to either reflect the advances we've seen over the last couple of decades, or else have enough brand new ideas of its own that it could stand out from the crowd. If you're looking at old Bulldog franchises, I'd much rather they try to resurrect Syndicate.

Wing Commander: Yes please. The space-combat-sim genre has been sadly dormant for many years now and this is one franchise where a full reboot would be highly desirable. Take it back to the Kilrathi war, spend a fortune on the FMV cutscenes and recreate the sinking "I'm going to need a new PC" series that the old games were known and loved for.

Theme Park: This one I'm really not convinced by. There's been an absolute flood of Theme-Sim-Tycoon games in recent years, many of which have focussed around Theme Parks. The quality has varied wildly, and I'm not sure the genre's standing is particularly high. I'm really not sure that there's much room to reawaken this franchise without a distinct feeling that you're flogging a dead horse.

Road Rash: Fun enough games in their day, but I'm not really sure the old Road Rash titles really stand comparison to the other 3 franchises named above. Still, if they want to make a fun, arcadey motorcycle combat game and stick the Road Rash name on it, it certainly wouldn't do any harm.

Re:More Like...

[hedwards]

Technically speaking killing the undead isn't murder.

System Shock

[rarel]

I'd love to see a sequel to System Shock 2, a third installment would not only complete the Shock series, it would also complete the great "Looking Glass Trinity" as one could call it: Thief, Shock, Deus Ex. Two of these have "lived" to see a third, as DX3 is currently in the works. Thief will even have a #4...
(I'm aware that DX isn't technically an LG game, but its development was heavily influenced by Shock and Thief to say the least.)

Plus Shock 2 just turned 10 this week ;)

Sadly it will probably never be done. EA may have some trademark but the whole Shock licence is scattered among people who probably don't know or care that they have it. Even Levine back in the day couldn't trace it back.

Sucks. :(

Ultima

[MatrixCubed]

Ultima died years ago. If brought back with the panache found at its pinnacle (IV-VII), it would far surpass any current-day RPG.

Milliways, Infocom & risking being eaten by a

[Daem(Off)]

I really miss the old Infocom games. I remember playing them the first round through in elementary school, HHGTtG gave my brain a real hardcore tease for the longest time. IF (Interactive Fiction) is just so much fun, for both authors as well as players.

Anybody else read the Choose Your Own Adventure series? I used to have the whole collection, I just wish they were longer. Would love to see something more along these lines for adults. (My gutter-fabulous mind can only start to envision some of the more 'adult' "tails" that could be chosen. *starts chortling to self*

I think also would be great to see a revival of the old games we used to play on BBS'. Still to this day trying to remember the title of this one, it simulated hacking, sort of like GIbson's Johnny Mnemonic, pre-Shadowrun sort of era. Turn based, only got so many a day, and I believe it was interactive with the other players as well, as you rose up in levels.

Well, probably enough nostalgia for now... Should get back to social-notworking....

How about Zero Wing

[oodaloop]

You don't even need to correct the English for kids today to recognize it. You know what you doing!

Not just graphics. . .

[JSBiff]

There are great reasons to make new games in 'old' franchises, or to re-do earlier games. Graphics is only one of those. There's also issues of the ability to do much more with sound now than some of the early games were able to do with the PC speakers, but even more importantly. . .

* Network/Internet multiplayer (ok, for some games multiplayer would make no sense, but for others, there's great potential

* More memory and faster CPUs means that not only can you update graphics, but you can create universes/worlds populated by more planets, stations, NPCs, ships, etc (how many of those really old games which were supposed to have 'epic' scope, ended up feeling a bit small or empty because of the memory and processing constraints of having 4M or less of memory? There's great opportunity to go back and have much 'bigger' worlds now that most 'gaming' machines have >= 1G of RAM.

Finally after nearly 20 years...

[bdleonard]

Maybe that Low Blow sequel I've been waiting for will become a reality. I mean a boxing game where the easiest way to win is kick the other guy in the crotch whenever the refs aren't looking. Can you think of a more realistic boxing experience?