Konami owned developer MercurySteam has shared a new teaser on their website.
This is the verbatim text on their frontpage:
>STATUS
Exploring new worlds, fighting strange creatures, discovering new heroes. Expect news soon.
From the looks of the image and the given description, Konami may have given the Spain based developer the reigns to the Contra franchise. Depending on how you look at it, this could be seen as good or bad news.
Of course, the developer is most famous now for having worked on the Castlevania Lords of Shadow reboot. The popularity of the first game in the series is unfortunately matched by the poor reception the followup games received.
There were many rumors that production of Castlevania Lords of Shadow2 in particular was hurt by internal struggles. Blame was particularly placed on studio developer Enric Alvarez, although we did not really get any official confirmation of this.
On another end, MercurySteam did confirm that they were moving on from the Castlevania games, and that Konami had a lot of faith in the developer in spite of the performance of its more recent work.
MercurySteam is certainly in an odd place, as a European dev that still works with Konami, in a time when Kojima has seemingly been removed from the company. It may be the case that MercurySteam is positioned well to take over as Konami’s lead studio, possibly even taking the reins for the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Here and now, however, it looks like they’re taking Contra.
Would you play a MercurySteam Contra game? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.