Microsoft’s big bosses were recently asked about the big games that they would want to see return. Interestingly, Sarah Bond and Phil Spencer had completely different answers.
At Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show, Sarah Bond revealed that she had received a lot of questions from fans, and also from interviewers, about Activision’s somewhat dormant RTS, StarCraft. As Sarah says below, “It will be fun to see if we can do something with that in the future.”
StarCraft has really only seen two official releases. The first StarCraft came out on Windows in 1998, with an expansion called StarCraft Brood War releasing later in the same year. StarCraft received a notable console port in StarCraft 64 for the Nintendo 64 in 2000, and officially received a remaster, simply called StarCraft: Remastered in 2017.
StarCraft II was released in three installments: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty came out in 2010, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm came out in 2013, and StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void released in 2015. StarCraft II may not have had as huge an impact as the original, but still remains one of Blizzard’s biggest games.
StarCraft received immediate critical acclaim upon release, and is one of the franchises that made Blizzard. It also launched an esports scene in South Korea, that was the predecessor of esports today.
On the other hand, Phil Spencer had a deep cut that he wanted to bring up. As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Phil wants to reexplore the MechWarrior franchise. Phil says:
“There’s so much about that whole franchise that in some way was ahead of its time, and it would be nice to get to go back and revisit.”
Showing he had a good sense of humor about current events, Phil ended his answer by quipping:
“We don’t have a plan today, so it’s not a leak of anything. Speaking of LEAKS…But that would be a nice one.”
MechWarrior is an interesting choice from Phil, but something of a licensing nightmare. The franchise really starts with Battletech, a wargaming board game published and created by FASA Corporation. MechWarrior is a spinoff of Battletech, and it is an RPG board game where you play a mech pilot.
Today, FASA Corporation no longer exists. The rights to the MechWarrior board games are owned by Topps, and Microsoft Game Studios themselves own the video game rights. So it’s natural that Microsoft would want to make new games in the franchise, but the company had been sitting on those rights for some time.
However, MechAssault itself is technically a different franchise, also in the Battletech universe. MechAssault differentiates itself by being a more arcade experience, thanks to the limited console controls. Both MechAssault games released exclusively on the Xbox. The first was notable as one of the first games that had Xbox Live online multiplayer.
It would certainly be interesting to see future StarCraft and MechWarrior\MechAssault games that were designed from the ground up to play on console and PC. As Phil said, there are no plans for either right now, but they are at least on Microsoft’s radar.
