Windjammers 2 Interview: Dotemu Devs Discuss How to Give a Cult Classic a Sequel

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Reviving a cult classic is never easy, but Dotemu appears to have pulled it off with Windjammers 2. Not only is Windjammers 2 a sequel to a cult classic sports game, but it's also a sequel that took about 28 years to come out. Fortunately, Dotemu put a team of Windjammers fans in charge of the project, and everyone involved seems to have gone above and beyond. Lead programmer Kevin Delbrayelle and art director Stephane Perez worked especially hard on Windjammers 2's polished mechanics and stylish hand-drawn graphics, respectively.

Game Rant spoke to Delbrayelle and Perez with assistance from facilitator Thomas Schulenberg about how Dotemu pulled off such an incredible revival of an IP that lay dormant for years, why the team chose to add what they did to the game, and what drove them to create such a labor of love. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Q: The first Windjammers game came out in 1994 for the NeoGeo. How did you end up with this old property?

Perez: I think it was quite a long journey. Back in the day, it was supposed to be Data East and SNK, they both worked on the game. But it was Data East who possessed the IP, and I think it moved to other companies. The first thing was to find which company possessed the IP. It took some time to deal with that, but we finally managed to get it, and we proposed to make another game, a sequel.

Delbrayelle: I think the Windjammers IP was owned by Paon DP, which is a Japanese company. It got the rights for Windjammers and some other old Data East games. At Dotemu, we have done quite a lot of SNK ports for mobile phones, and unfortunately, Windjammers was not an SNK IP. So it was not easy to get