How the Windjammers fans at Dotemu got their chance to make a sequel

polygon.com:

This was always the plan, Dotemu’s Cyrille Imbert said. The French studio, known for its restorations and remasterings of several 1990s hits, spent the past decade earning a reputation for carefully and respectfully handling other companies’ properties. Now, Dotemu’s developers are getting the dream assignments they wanted all along: make all-new sequels for things they loved as kids themselves.

The process has culminated, again, in Windjammers2, Dotemu’s wholly original sequel to the 1990 Pong-meets-beach-volleyball classic, which launched last week for Google Stadia, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. (It’s also available on Xbox Game Pass.) Imbert’s studio remastered the original in 2017 for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch after hunting down the rights owner — Paon DP, which bought Windjammers and other Data East franchises out of that company’s liquidation.

“I went to Japan with a pitch, but with the idea of doing both,” Imbert said. “First, a remaster, to relaunch the hype around the game, make it known again. And then, once we reached that goal […] we could launch a sequel, because it just makes sense; there never has been a sequel from the original [Windjammers], and there are so many things that can be improved, and worked on, that weren’t present.”

The same two-stage, long game approach to getting their hands on others’ IP has paid off in three other highly visible projects Dotemu has developed and/or published. The approval for 2020’s highly successful Street of Rage 4 grew out of a 2017 remake of Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Trap, a 1989 game for the Sega Master System. Metal SlugTactics, coming sometime this year, is an all-original follow-up to four re-releases of SNK’s Metal Slug