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News I didn’t anticipate hit my inbox yesterday when, like a summoned ghost of my ’90s childhood, a revived Argonaut Games introduced it was remastering PS1-era platformer Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.
If you are not acquainted, Argonaut was a British developer liable for video games like Buck Bumble (which had some of the inexplicable themes of all time), the unique PS1 Harry Potter video games, and, nicely, Croc 1 and a couple of. It additionally had a hand within the unique SNES Star Fox, which is the place you may know the studio from if you realize it in any respect.
Alas, Argonaut hit the rocks when it was liquidated in 2004, getting into the dustbin of historical past seemingly perpetually. Until yesterday, when for causes I do not fairly observe the corporate got here again from the lifeless to announce it was bringing again Croc, child.
Which is nice information for me. Croc was the sport that was virtually solely liable for my 6-year-old self begging mum and pa to purchase a PS1 (it was additionally on PC and Saturn, however younger me did not know that) again in 1999. I’d seen the platformer (which, now that I consider it, is rather a lot like Spyro) in motion at a buddy’s home and knew—proper there after which—that it was clearly the best videogame ever made and I merely needed to play it.
I ultimately bought my PS1, however I by no means truly bought Croc. Instead I bought Metal Gear Solid 1 and 007: Tomorrow Never Dies, setting me irrevocably on the trail to changing into the person I’m at the moment. The information of the remaster, then, genuinely has me a bit excited to really discover out if the sport is any good.
That is that if my so-called colleagues at PC Gamer do not poison my thoughts towards it first. When I gaily introduced that the sport was getting revived within the group Slack, the information was greeted with slander and calumny. “A recreation my outdated editor used to check with as ‘A Croc of shite’,” wrote Robin Valentine. “I used to be simply typing Croc of shite,” agreed Jake Tucker moments later. “I hear it is a Croc of shite,” veteran newsman Andy Chalk subsequently instructed me in an e-mail.
So they’re all lifeless to me, however Croc could be very a lot alive and coming to PC, and it will even function a “Crocipedia”—a wonderful Croc archive like you could find in Nightdive’s Quake remasters—to unfold the phrase of Croc. There’s no date on it but, or perhaps a record of storefronts, opening up the very humorous risk that Tim Sweeney has swept in to buy some sort of time-limited exclusivity for Croc, however I’m positive we’ll hear extra quickly.
Update: This piece has been amended to notice that the unique Croc additionally launched on the PC and Sega Saturn.
