Robotech is one of the more beloved animated shows from the '80s, introducing scores of fans to anime for the first time. Even two decades after the series' original release, there was enough interest to help produce a brand-new movie sequel in 2006. When asked about making a sequel to their own Robotech video games, Vicious Cycle was very enthusiastic.
“I would love to do it tomorrow! It wasn't like my childhood series to watch, but I understand the anime fans and they're hungry for product,” said Vicious Cycle president and CEO Eric Peterson. “[Robotech] hasn't made it to current gen systems; there hasn't been an entry on PS3, Wii or Xbox 360. They're going to want to have it because they're hardcore fans, and we'd love to give it to them. It's an opportunity that could sell and the first game was a wonderful experience for us. There was a lot of passion for the company and we had a lot of Robotech fanboys, which helped! We had a collector's edition and it was a lot of fun making it. We had some great marketing for it and some positive reviews and eventually sold a half million copies."
When asked what happened with Robotech: Invasion, based around the third story arch of the Robotech series, Peterson was frank in his response. “We were told for Invasion to make a Halo clone. We wanted to make it a Battlecry sequel because we knew the fans wanted lots of missiles, Veritech fighters and cel shading. You take that out, you ruin the license,” explained Peterson. “We probably sold the expected amount of copies to those fans, but there are more Veritech fans out there and they buy into the Robotech legacy, but many of them don't remember the second series based on Southern Cross and probably even fewer remember Genesis Climber Mospeada.“
Read more in the full interview with Vicious Cycle.
1 Comments
June 18, 2010
Robotech has potential, it always did, even as a hack job of Macross. Whether they ca get it right this time is the big question.
But saying that, some of the japanese Macross games are up to much either. I have Ace Frontier on PSP, and while its cool and japanese its hella awkward to play. You'd think something like this would play like ZoE, but the gameplay is flawed. Mecha is not just about shooting at the enemy, but beating the shit out of them CQC style too.
A good Macross/Robotech game should be a sweet mix of flying shoot em up combat, combat on foot in robot and gerwalk mode, and maybe some character based 3rd person mission outside of the mechs too. I'm yet to see any of this from the series though, but in a post Gears/RE4 world, perhaps now is a good time to try again. I really hope they can pull it off, and give War on Cybertron a run for its robot money.