Sega promised a new era at The Game Awards and gave us five games to look forward to. Good, "new" is doing a lot of heavy lifting: the famous developer announced that new titles based on Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Ax and Streets of Rage are coming.
Depending on your age, those titles can mean several things to you. Golden Ax and Shinobi have their roots in '80s arcades, while Streets of Rage is a Genesis classic. Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio Both were released in the Dreamcast era (with Crazy Taxi making its debut in arcades first).
Various highlights fighting game creators received physical invitations from Sega to tune in to The Game Awards, leading to speculation that a Virtua Fighter revival was part of the company's plans for the event. Unless Sega is holding back another trailer, it looks like those people will walk away a little disappointed.
Sega's parent company, SegaSammy, has been uncomfortably talking about a "super game" project since 2021. The term was only really defined as a game capable of generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Sega. Super! In the same investor presentation, the company openly contemplated reviving “dormant” properties like Virtua Fighter, Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi through remasters, remakes and reboots.
Other game series listed for revival, such as Space Channel 5, Panzer Dragoon, and Streets of Rage, have seen some action. Space Channel 5 I have a remastered virtual reality port, Panzer Dragon got a remake and Streets of Rage got an excellent new numbered release, streets of rage 4developed and published by third parties under license from Sega.
Four of the new titles appear, judging by the small glimpses of Sega's trailer, to be big-budget 3D affairs. The Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio revivals appear to be glossy HD versions of the games they're based on, while the Golden Ax reboot in particular is unrecognizable from the 2D scroller it's based on. Streets of Rage also appears to be fully 3D. Only Shinobi looks somewhat familiar, using a 2D style close to that of Dotemu. Windjammers 2 and streets of rage 4.
The current Sega is very different from the one that made the originals. The turn of the century saw Sega struggle through a multi-stage midlife crisis in search of a new identity; The Dreamcast was in the process of being outsold by Sony's PlayStation 2, leading Sega to exit the console business in 2001. At the same time, the arcade resurgence of the '90s that saw Sega becoming a technological leader was quickly fading.
After some missteps in the early days of third-party publishing and an acquisition by pachinko maker Sammy, Sega began to recover. The mid-2000s saw the debut of the Yakuza series, and since then the company has made several key acquisitions, including Sports Interactive (Football Manager), Creative Assembly (Total War), Relic Entertainment (Warhammer), Atlus ( Megami Tensei/ Persona) and, more recently, Angry Birds creator Rovio. He has also had success in theaters with his Sonic the Hedgehog films.
And here I am waiting for a new Seaman game.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sega-is-resurrecting-its-classics-including-jet-set-radio-crazy-taxi-and-golden-axe-022041470.html?src =rss
