Activision tease a remake of the Spyro trilogy
Time to get paid.
The Internet went a little flutter at the end of last week as, shockingly, people were able to report some actual good news about Activision for a change. First off, they reported that the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy absolutely smashed their expectations in terms of sales, and secondly they put a little teaser out there that another franchise they managed to grab by way of Sony could be next -- that being Spyro the Dragon. The response from the Internet can be summed up as, quite simply, "Take my money NOW GODDAMNIT NOW".
It's easy to see why Activision might not have been expecting too much out of Crash: Someone still kind of needed to test the water when it came to re-releasing and remastering platformers from early in the PS1 era, and some of Activision's previous efforts in this department hadn't really gone down all that well - Tony Hawk's HD, anyone? But the high quality of Vicarious Visions' work in bringing classic Crash to both a new generation and back to those who loved it in the mid '90s has clearly shone through, and there's no doubt that people will welcome the same treatment being done to Spyro, another much loved PS1 era platformer with an original trilogy of utterly adored games that kinda floundered a little after the PS1 era came to an end. Honestly, a Spyro remaster seems like a no-brainer at this point and if Activision are teasing it then this is probably a question of when, and not if the game's going to be announced.
Activision acquired Spyro in 2008, at pretty much exactly the same time that they acquired Crash Bandicoot. One worry that people have voiced about the possibility of a new Spyro game is that Activision might retroactively meddle with the games a bit -- Spyro has been a part of Activision's Skylanders series after all, and knowing them it's not exactly impossible for them to screw up all this goodwill and change Spyro from his classic design into his Skylanders form, which would not be welcome. I would lean towards this not happening, as Crash has also been a part of the Skylanders franchise -- however, this did not affect the current remasters, and if Vicarious Visions end up doing this remaster as well you'd expect them to do well again...however, we are talking about a company who took a remaster of one of the best and most influential games they have ever released and decided to shove it into the deluxe edition of the latest naff game in the franchise for an exorbitant amount of money, so who knows what's going to happen?
There is another big question, mind you; presuming that a remaster of the Spyro trilogy does go ahead (and moves units in the expected way)...what's next for Activision after that? There's a fair amount of great games and franchises in their library, of course, but the trouble with a lot of them is that they're mostly licensed games, most of which they don't have the rights to anymore -- which is something of a shame, 'cause lord knows people would love to see a remaster of, say, the classic PS1 and PS2 Spider-Man games, or the likes of Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy (Tony Hawk was abused so much by Activision in the end that no-one probably wants to see that). One wonders what else they could really do -- bring the Interstate games back from the dead? Go to the last generation and revive the excellent cult racer Blur? Crash and Spyro weren't there's to begin with, mind -- so maybe there's the possibility of grabbing more unwanted IP's from other companies, or for other companies to look at what happened with Crash and think about doing the same...for now, it remains to be seen just what effect the success of Crash Bandicoot will have on the world of HD remasters.
