We have some interesting new rumors about a Bully rerelease, and we believe you will be surprised by the finer details.
As reported by RockstarIntel, Australia and Taiwan have posted new age ratings for Bully Canis Canem. This lines up with earlier datamining that found that Bully could be coming to GTA +. And here’s where we get to the finer details. The Australia rating only lists the PlayStation 5. However, the Taiwanese rating lists PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and Xbox 360.
RockstarIntel speculates that the Xbox 360 version of Bully Canis Canem was listed in error, and in doing this, they are accounting for the fact that Microsoft is in the process of shutting down the Xbox 360 store. This may have been a situation where Take-Two didn’t find out in time that the shutdown was happening. Maybe they intended to still give this game out as a reward for the few Grand Theft Auto V players with GTA + and still on their Xbox 360 consoles?
The other notable detail is the ratings deliberately list the game as Bully Canis Canem, as opposed to Bully Scholarship Edition. The original 2006 release of the game on the PlayStation 2 was retroactively named as Bully Canis Canem. In contrast, Bully Scholarship Edition was the name of the remaster that the game received when it was brought to Wii, Xbox 360, and Windows in 2008.
Bully Scholarship Edition is ostensibly the better version, with more content added to it. However, because of difficulties switching game engines from RenderWare to Gamebryo, the remaster has some bugs and issues of their own.
So, the speculation here is that Rockstar dropped the Gamebryo-based Bully Scholarship Edition and made a remaster of the original Bully Canis Canem.
Unfortunately, Rockstar doesn’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to rereleasing their old games. Their name is still very much marred by the botched release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. While their subsequent rerelease of the original Red Dead Redemption to PlayStation 4 and Switch had no issues, gamers were not inclined to be forgiving, and considered the new port a disappointment.
Obviously, Rockstar is sitting on a goldmine of legacy IP, but that’s somewhat the case with every video game company from the West. We’ll see how well this port does, but both of their recent rereleases indicates that Rockstar would prefer to make these with low budgets and with a minimum of supervision. We would love it if they could prove us wrong this time.
