Atari Is Open To Pitches For A New Bubsy Game

OMG As someone who's literally spent the last few years making a multipurpose "Sonic-style" engine for all platforms, I could totally make a really, really good 2d Bubsy game... I'd love to try that! 😍 I always liked Bubsy as a character and I remember being totally hyped for the first game to come out. As a kid I used to draw pictures and comics of him and Sonic together!

Isn't every Bubsy game up until now really awful?
Well if they put some effort into it to rectify that, why not?

@Scollurio The only truly awful one is Bubsy 3d, imo. But the 2d platformers are far from perfect because he has the speed & momentum of Sonic but the levels have too many enemies and traps that you need to prepare for, meaning many, many unfair deaths...

The way around this is to carefully tiptoe around and learn the layouts and memorise them, until you know them well enough to play at speed. Most won't have the patience to do this, as it can be very frustrating. Some feel that these criticisms can be aimed at 2D Sonic games, but its much worse with the Bubsy titles.

That said, there is a lot to like about them especially the character designs, level themes and humour (which could get repetitive back in teh day, but now with the capacity for far more storage, that can be avoided). I can totally imagine taking the sprites and tilesets and making a more forgiving and fun game with better level layouts. I actually think there's a lot of potential.

@Scollurio The first game was at best, average. I rented it when it was new (so I didn't have the meme influence) and I thought it was alright. Though I could see why some would not like the Looney Tunes-level amount of ways for the bobcat to die in the game. Like there was a chance for death at almost every turn. But maybe since I was huge into LT at that time, I could probably tolerate that was certainly a theme of the game.
The problem is that games just went downhill from there.

@KingMike Yeah I'd agree the first is the best. The real shame for me was the exclusive Jaguar title - really cool ideas but not at all executed well.

@samuelvictor The only Bubsy game from the old era i consider decent is the first entry. The Jaguar entry has really good music by Imagitec Design but good lord the enemy placement can be downright just evil.

I've heard somewhat decent things about the two more recent Bubsy entries but nothing outstanding either. If somebody can make a Bubsy game that legit looks like a 90s cartoon then i would down with that

You’re gilding a turd. A meme turd. Get a more appealing character.

@KGRAMR Yeah the Jagaur one was really dissappointing as it had so much potential.

I would definitely like to see a 90s cartoon style animated game, that would be awesome! However my own game engine was designed specifically to replicate the look and feel of the retro engine (Sonic Mania etc) with the same base resolution so if I made a Bubsy game, it would be pixel art based.

I could see me making fully animated intro & cutscenes (I studied animation with Don Bluth amongst others and love to make short hand drawn animations)... just not an entire game. I'm very married to the pixel style and having everything based around traditional 16x16 tilesets. I really enjoy making authentic "90s style" games.

Just make up a new character? Here's one, Larry the lemur, there, you can have that for free and it's already better than bubsy

@samuelvictor Thank you for putting into words why the gameplay felt so difficult. As a kid, I played it for the sillynes and lack of other games, but died all the time! I can still hear him say “what could possibly go wrong?”

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

I'd buy a new Bubsy game on Atari VCS. I didn't really hate Bubsy 3d, it wasn't good but I still had fun playing it.

There’s so much ‘tude in this comment section, so much so that I thought it was 1993 😜

I played the heck out of Bubsy on Genesis and wanted to like it so much more. For as much of an attempted clone as it was, I still enjoyed it. Honestly I think it’s better than a good handful of the mascot clone games of the era—this doesn’t make it a good game though lol

@HoyeBoye No worries! its surprisingly difficult to get level design right with Sonic style momentum and speed. Many big "Sonic clones" of the time got this wrong, often the character designs, graphics, music and speed would all be really good, but they'd be frustrating to play. I have a lot of love for them, but you could easily feel this way about Jazz Jackrabbit, Zool, Superfrog, etc....

Nah, I like Bubsy. I think there's definitely charm and humor the right person could wring out of specifically that character. It might take putting something of a spin on him (and I've never been too attached to the gameplay of any of them so do with that what you will), but I would like to see at least one unironic banger of a Bubsy game someday.