Windjammers 2 Developers Say The Sequel is a Labor of Love

gamerant.com:

Windjammers 2 is a sequel that's incredibly faithful to the original, which is a remarkable achievement. Making a sequel to an existing game is rarely easy, but things get much, much harder when the game in question is a cult classic that has lain dormant for decades. Despite this, French video game developer Dotemu decided to release a sequel to the 90s sports arcade game Windjammers, which was released back in 1994 for the Neo Geo arcade system. Windjammers 2 is fast-paced, colorful, and a love letter to the original game. In fact, according to lead programmer Kevin Delbrayelle and art director Stephanie Perez, it exists because Dotemu loved the first Windjammers too much to let the IP go dormant again. Delbrayelle and Perez spoke to Game Rant about how—and why—they resurrected the Windjammers series.

According to Delbrayelle and Perez, Windjammers 2 was a passion project. The seeds were planted when Dotemu got the chance to port the original Windjammers to new platforms—specifically, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation Vita. Working on this port was Delbrayelle's first job at Dotemu, and he soon found himself falling in love with the game. As it turned out, he was in good company because the rest of the studio had known about Windjammers for a long time. Perez stated that they used to play Windjammers on the old arcade cabinets, so when the possibility of making a new Windjammers game was raised, the whole team was excited to start work. However, the developers soon ran into their first problem: figuring out who currently owned the property. This wasn't the first time the studio had made a sequel to a dormant franchise, but it might be one of the most difficult to get off the ground.

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