The original Kingdom Hearts launched on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. I don’t know about you, but the fact that the first mish-mash of Disney and Square Enix occurred about 11 years ago just seems insane. However, plenty of people missed out on the wildly popular action-RPG when it first came out, which is one of the biggest reasons it’s being re-mastered in the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix. You’d think it wouldn’t be too difficult a task to just pretty the game up for modern consoles, but the whole project became a struggle once Tetsuya Nomura realized the original data and assets were long gone.
"Kingdom Hearts was created a long, long time ago," Nomura said in an interview that Polygon translated. "The original data was missing already. It was lost so we had to research, to dig out the original game and recreate everything for HD. It was not that easy."
That’s quite a bit of work for just one PS2 game, but Kingdom Hearts fans have been pining for an HD port for quite some time. And if you happened to hear the crowd’s reaction to the announcement of Kingdom Hearts 3 during Sony’s E3 press conference, it’s pretty obvious that there’s still a significant audience ready and waiting to continue Sora’s adventures.
We’re still a long way away from the release of the third Kingdom Hearts game, but you won’t have to wait too much longer to enjoy how it all started. Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix is launching in the U.S., Europe and Australia in early September.
