One of the most unexpected Sega Dreamcast ports of recent years was Crazy Viking Studios' Volgarr The Viking.
Originally developed for the PC, the brutal action-platformer made its debut on the Sega console back in 2015, thanks to the incredible efforts of a software engineer named Marc Hall, who managed to obtain permission from the studio to release his Dreamcast port online for free. From there, it eventually went on to generate a lot of enthusiastic responses online from members of the Dreamcast community which has left some wondering whether Volgarr's recently released sequel Volgarr the Viking II might eventually get the same treatment in the near future.
Last month, we were given the opportunity to chat with Crazy Viking Studios' CEO/creative director Kristofor Durrshmidt, and we couldn't help but ask the question we knew was everyone's mind: will the game be coming to Dreamcast? And here's what he had to say.
"You would think it would be really easy to make a sprite-based game on today's hardware," Durrshmidt told us. "It isn't. And the reason for that is you have to write something custom because all video cards nowadays are designed for 3D pipelines. So when you want to make a 2D sprite game with large painted worlds and things like that, it has to be made into a texture, basically, and applied to a 3D plane. That's really the only way you can kind of get it in there.
"So when you're doing that, you start thinking about the ginormous world that Volgarr has to run through and it's this absolutely insane texture. It doesn't matter if you've got the latest video card or not. I mean, Call of Duty doesn't use textures this big. So you have to figure out ways to chop it up. You have to figure out ways to kind of load things on the fly and drop things off and load things in. So it's kind of like streaming, kind of like Unreal does, but with polygons. You also have sprites with hundreds of frames of animation there. You know, 64 x 64 textures, but with thousands of frames of animation. That makes another huge texture, again, you have to deal with. So, obviously, the Dreamcast doesn't do that."
In his response, Durrshmidt went on to celebrate some of the incredible work that Hall did on the Dreamcast version in regards to cutting these textures down into easy-to-handle chunks but then conceded that the same would probably not be possible for Volgarr II due to the sequel's sheer size and scope.
"Volgarr 2 is a much larger game, so it probably will not ever come to the Dreamcast," he told us. "The reason for that is the original game already kind of pushed what the Dreamcast could do believe it or not."
In addition to the above, it's also worth noting that Marc Hall has since moved on from Crazy Viking Studios and is currently working elsewhere, reducing the odds of them being able to dedicate time to porting the sequel. We asked Durrshmidt whether he'd be open to someone else giving the port a try and he seemed to welcome the idea and said he would never "turn that down"
"I tell you what, if they want to, they're more than happy to try. I won't tell them no. I'm sure [it's the same] with Mike [Mika, the studio head at Digital Eclipse] as well. if they want to reach out to Mike, they can ask him. If some super engineer is out there who has a lot of time on their hands to figure this out, I won't ever turn that down. I mean there's a big passionate community out there for Dreamcast. It would be silly otherwise."
So, in other words, for now, there's no chance of Volgarr The Viking II releasing on Dreamcast, but if someone from the Dreamcast community wants to step up, they're welcome to give it a try.