As a games writer I am, of course, unconscionably rich. Unfortunately, my assets are mostly tied up in procuring designer drugs and funding guerilla movements across the world, so I don’t have quite the free reign on my wealth that some other folks do. Folks like Atari CEO Wade Rosen, for instance, who recently sat down with the good people at VGC to chat about the remaster “passion projects” he’d like to get the company to work on some day. Atari does own Nightdive, after all.
Don’t let me keep you waiting: those games are Panzer Dragoon Saga, Ogre Battle, and Snatcher. Which aren’t what I’d pick, but maybe that’s why I’m not the chief executive of anything.
“I don’t know if it would do well,” says Rosen, “but I’d probably push it through and make sure we did it just because I would love to work on one of those.”
To be fair, just because they aren’t what I’d choose doesn’t mean they aren’t good choices. If you’re unfamiliar, Panzer Dragoon Saga is a Sega Saturn RPG from 1998. It was Sega’s attempt to go toe-to-toe with Final Fantasy and, while we all know how that worked out, the game itself is a much-beloved cult classic.
As for Ogre Battle, well, that’d be the series that the equally loved Tactics Ogre tactical RPG belongs to, alongside a few other RTS and tactics games. It actually got a recent doll-up in the form of Tactics Ogre: Reborn, but other games in the series still languish in the past.
And then there’s Snatcher. Or, to give it the name it would surely have if it got re-released today: Snatcher, a Hideo Kojima game. It’s effectively a kind of visual novel that has you navigating a cyberpunk city in the not-too-distant future(!) Also, you’re an amnesiac, which is an issue. You hope to solve that conundrum by becoming, in essence, a blade runner.
They’re all games that undoubtedly deserve preservation. As to whether they’d sell, well, Rosen’s not so sure. “It all has to be in a balance,” he says. “If this company just became like ‘what games does Wade want to work on?’ we would not be around too long.”
So ideally, you do a little of both: the crowd-pleasers and the cult-favourites. “If you go too far in any one direction—if you’re only numbers-driven, it crushes the spirit of the company. If you’re only passion-driven, well, you oftentimes don’t have a company,” says Rosen.
“We all work together and choose jointly what we’re going to work on, but there will definitely be a few like Outlaws that the team kind of throws out and I’m like ‘yeah, let’s give it a swing’.”
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