Det lader til, at vi måske snart får en ny 16 bit-konsol, med spil på klassiske kassetter at se frem til, der desuden er designet tæt op ad Atari's Jaguar. Det er Mike Kennedy, udgiveren bag Retro Magazine, der sætter en Kickstarter-kampagne i gang for Retro.
Venture Beat har snakket med Kennedy om hans planer, og han siger:
"This goes back probably two and a half years. The timing just wasn't right, I didn't think, at that point, for the console I wanted to bring out, which was going to be a cartridge-based console to play new games on cartridges. It's not like the Retron 5 where you can plug in your old NES carts. There are lots of ways to play your old carts on a variety of other clone systems."
Kennedy fortsætter med at forklare omkring Retro'ens koncept:
"What I wanted to do a couple years ago was make a brand-new console that just ran off carts again. It's all solid state technology, right? A cartridge-based system, just like the Atari. You can still find Ataris at the swap meet, cartridges, 30 years later, plug them in and it all works. To me that's the coolest technology out there, with that longevity. A lot of us grew up with it. The kids these days are going to miss out on that."
Vi kan se frem til spil som Shovel Knight og Retro City Rampage, men Kennedy taler også med store udgivere, for at få klassikerne tilbage, siden de kan være svære at få fat på:
We're trying to talk to some big-name publishers about bringing back old fan favorites on this thing, or sequels. That's actually why I'm up here in San Francisco, meeting with a third party developer that's done a lot of third-party development work for Sony and Capcom and Konami and Sega. We'll be partnering with this group to lead our charge into those types of companies to work out licensing deals for some of these games that they haven't monetized in 10-15-20 years. As you know, there's a lot of games out there that people would love to see brought back."
Kennedy forklarer, at han ikke synes at smartphones er et godt alternativ, og at disse gamle spil skal bruge gammeldags controllere:
"A lot of these games wouldn't come back and play real well on mobile. You play retro remakes on mobile, right? The touch screen is horrible. There's just no way around it. For retro-style games, you need precision control. You don't want any controller lag. You need that zen-like experience that a wired controller can give you. There's a lot of these games that we think, with the right treatment and the connections involved - it's possible we might be able to go out and bring back some of your favorite NES-style or Super NES or Sega Genesis games as sequels. We're putting down our wish list of what titles we would like to see brought back."
Se hele interviewet på Venture Beat.
Vil du støtte op om ideen?