RoboCop
Image: Orion Pictures / MGM

The Sega Mega Drive / Genesis is getting plenty of attention from homebrew developers at the moment, and we're all for it. The 16-bit system is getting unofficial ports of Final Fight, The Simpsons and Sunset Riders, and we've got another title to add to that growing list: Data East's original arcade version of RoboCop.

The person behind this project is Retro Encoder, and they've been working away on the port for some time now, posting regular video updates on their Twitter account. The first was in August, and the most recent (at the time of writing) was yesterday, showing off the new collision detection system.

Originally released in 1988, Data East's RoboCop was a smash hit in arcades and was quickly ported to home systems. Data East famously had to sub-license the game from British publisher Ocean, which had snapped up the video game rights to the movie when it was still in the scripting stage. Ocean would handle the majority of the home conversions of the coin-op.

While it repeated its commercial success on domestic formats, what's surprising is that only the NES and Game Boy got ports. The Mega Drive and PC Engine – both of which were far more capable of hosting a faithful conversion than Nintendo's machines – missed out.

Retro Encoder is hopefully about to fix that oversight, giving RoboCop fans another reason to be excited – we're also getting a new RoboCop for modern-day systems, too.