Wii fans more interested in Battletoads than Twycross’ bosses
Poll shows huge support to Rare’s old classics circa 1993
While Microsoft and Nintendo find in retro games a new gold rush to make profit with their older games, Rare -with its large catalogue- has shown no interest in the possibility of porting its classics to Xbox Live Arcade, nor through the Wii’s Virtual Console (assuming they are allowed to do so).
This very same year Rare has denied not once, but a couple of times, that they don’t intend to make a port of any Battletoads title for XLA, despite the interest repeatedly shown by their fans. They usually argue that the original games were too hard, and the public wouldn’t approve such difficult gameplay nowadays.
The last time we had an official statement from Rare about no new Battletoads releases was, in fact, in the recent Scribes of October, when a member from the original team (probably Gregg Mayles) denied the possibility of a port, as well as a new title for Xbox 360: “It’s a little known fact that only two people were actually skilled enough to complete this game. […] I think it would have a somewhat limited appeal in today’s market where cosseted players virtually want the games to play themselves. Even if we did do a new game, it would never top the legendary British achievements that are Jammie Dodgers, so we would sadly be wasting our time.”
If we look back into February 2006 Scribes edition, we find that the designer of Battletoads, Ghoulies and Banjo had also the same opinion about this issue: “If porting games to Xbox Live Arcade was just a simple case of pressing a button, then we’d have ported the lot in a couple of hours and waited for the cash to roll in. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that, and many old games as they stand would not be suitable for Live Arcade. Battletoads is probably one, as it featured an almost inhuman difficulty level that many of today’s players would not appreciate, let alone handle.”
So, we perfectly know Rare’s position. But do they really know if people are keen on a revival of these old glories? We bet they aren’t. But an innocent poll from GameSpot about Wii retro titles for the Virtual Console has recently shown how popular these frogs can be even in present days.
When asked about the Virtual Console’s line-up for the rest of 2006, a 24% (9,790 persons) stated they felt like if they were “in retro heaven”; another 27% (10,773) said that if they are spending $250, is “to play next-gen games”; a lower 15% (6,020) feel nostalgic about “the days when games had simple names like Baseball, Tennis, and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.” Ok. Good. But an overwhelming 32% (12,991 people by the time poll closed) chose “WHERE’S BATTLETOADS!!!???!?!??”. Incredible, considering that almost any Battletoads’ fan still alive is probably over 25 years old already.
Rare released in 1993 a good bunch of Battletoads titles for many systems, published by Tradewest. But this company didn’t survive to the 90s, along with shoulder pads and the Spice Girls. So the Battletoads rights got lost in limbo, which is due to be closed by the Vatican in the near future, moving Rash, Zitz and Pimple’s souls to god knows what kind of place. For the moment, not in the Wii or X360 retro titles line-up.
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