Electronic Arts Plans Multiple Classic Game Revivals

Video game publisher Electronic Arts seems to be ready to mine its rich history for franchises that have captured the imagination of gamers and could be revived and updated to meet the requirements of the contemporary market.

Frank Gibeau, who is the leader of the EA Labels division at Electronic Arts, has told CVG that, “We do have a couple of old franchises that we’re looking at right now… reimagining them and bringing them back. We’ve got 25 years of good IPs and I’ve worked on a few of them in my career like Road Rash and the Strike series. So I have a strong affinity for a lot of the things we’ve done in the past.”

But the executive believes that it's not a good idea to create remakes for old franchises by strip mining their essence.

EA has recently said that it will not release a Road Rash game it has been working on because it did not meet the quality requirement of the publisher.

Gibeau added, “We kind of have a rule which is you’ve got to have a really good reason to bring something back – what can you do to it that makes it fresh and brings something new to the equation of the franchise?”

One resurrection project that has been apparently going since 2008 is a collaboration with Starbreeze Studios on something called Project Redlime, which is at the moment widely rumored to be an updated version of classic Syndicate.

Electronic Arts also recently trademarked names linked to the Alpha Centauri strategy game that Firaxis has developed way back, although this does not mean that a remake will be created.

It would be interesting to see whether Electronic Arts uses the new Origin digital distribution service it has created to re-launch all its back catalog and whether it will use the player interest in those games in order to see which intellectual properties it will update.