Venerable video game developer Sunsoft has teased some new announcements after years of inactivity.
Key observers will remember that Sunsoft held a livestream in August 2022. At that time, they announced rereleases for their Famicom games Ufouria: The Saga, known as Hebereke in Japan, and Gimmick! Both are classic platformers, with the latter often cited as a hidden gem, for its limited Western release and its quality.
What they announced then were rereleases of both games for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows, planned for early 2023. We have yet to see those releases but that takes us to now.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, a new scheduled livestream has come up on YouTube, fittingly named Sunsoft is Back 2. The stream is scheduled for April 19 at 11pm PT / April 20 at 2am ET / April 20 at 7am BST.
While the name is forgotten today, Sunsoft was at one point one of Japan’s premier arcade and home console video game developers. Sunsoft was particularly noteworthy for having picked up several lucrative licenses and making good games out of them, at a time when licensed games had a poor reputation.
Here’s a quick look at some of their more famous and noteworthy releases:
Kangaroo, 1982, arcade
Blaster Master, 1988, NES
Batman, 1989, NES
Gremlins 2: The New Batch, 1990, NES
Batman: Return of The Joker, 1991, NES, Sega Genesis, and Game Boy
The Death and Return of Superman, 1994, SNES and Sega Genesis
Galaxy Fight: Universal Warriors, 1995, Neo Geo
Phantom 2040, 1995, Sega Genesis and SNES
Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday, 1995, SNES
Waku Waku 7, 1996, Neo Geo
Final Fantasy Adventure, 1998, Game Boy
While Sunsoft became a sporadic game developer and publisher in later years, it didn’t suffer the fate of colleagues like Data East or Hudson for a simple reason. They were a division of a bigger company, Sun Corporation, and Sun Corporation itself has been doing fine.
Sun’s main business is in electronics, and through the years they had made devices like pachinko machines, routers, smart glasses, even their own bespoke personal computers. It just seems that the company’s journey did not mirror that of colleagues like Konami’s or Bandai Namco’s, that diversified to other businesses but kept their video games division going.
Sunsoft’s current plans seem to be focused on bringing back their classic game library, but not so much in working in wholly original games full stop. They had already published Gimmick in Japan as an arcade exclusive in 2020. More recently, they published Ikki Unite in February 15, 2023 on Steam.
This definitely will not be a return of the classic Sunsoft team, but it could mean we could see some remasters and rereleases of their older games. Obviously, Sunsoft could very well have been talking to Warner Bros Games about rereleasing their licensed video game library as well. So it’ll be very interesting to see what they have planned to announce next week.
If you want to watch out for it, you can watch the live stream below.
