Update 4/5/18: It’s official! Spyro Reignited Trilogy hits the PS4 and Xbox One on September 21, 2018. No word on a Nintendo Switch version yet, but the rumors are already running high.
Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy has been out for a couple of months now, and it’s proven once again why remakes make sense, not to mention that they can be wildly successful. It’s exceeded expectations, broken sales records, and carried us all down a sweet, sweet memory lane. But now that enough time has passed for many of us to complete the games, not to mention for us to come down off of the nostalgia, some of us have already started looking ahead.
I, for one, am always weighing the possibilities for our next addictive dose of nostalgia, but if we are limiting these possibilities specifically to Activision, then I think I speak for a vast majority of gamers when I say that it must, nay, needs to be Spyro. After all, Crash and Spyro enjoyed nothing short of a symbiotic relationship in their glory days, and they even had two crossover games in which they both worked together to defeat their respective villains. They were two major series’ that anyone who’s ever played a PSone can recall as a symbol of that generation, and serve a lot of this generation’s gamers as their very first foray into video games. Not to mention, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage laid down a great deal of the groundwork for this generation’s obsession with open worlds and side questing.
It’s no wonder, then, that Crash Bandicoot’s comeback almost a decade later has many people wondering about Spyro’s; but this speculation is nothing new. Two years ago, before the N. Sane Trilogy was even a thing, whispers and rumors of something like it were popping up everywhere, and they were only bolstered by the fact that some fans were attempting to take the matter into their own hands. One such fan, a UK-based student and programmer named Jamie Shilvock, took it upon himself to re-imagine the “Artisan’s Homeworld” from the original Spyro the Dragon in Unreal Engine 4, and it’s beautiful. If you haven’t seen it, check it out on YouTube.
Videos like Jamie Shilvock’s happen with so many classic games nowadays. They’re a living testament to the devotion and fandom behind the games that inspire them, and they’re often used as support for the cases made all over the internet for remakes. Jamie’s Shilvock’s is that for Spyro, and reports like this one were that for Crash. It kept the seemingly implausible future of Crash alive, and in hindsight was our first and only tangible hint that our wishes were coming true. In it, the article reported all the way back in 2014 that Activision had been working on new Crash and Spyro titles, and a developer from the project published the work-in-progress screenshots after they both ended up being canceled.
Take a look at those screenshots; don’t they look a whole hell of a lot like N. Sane Trilogy? Perhaps Activision made the decision that remakes of the original games was necessary to pave the way for new ones. This idea seems to be backed up by Activision themselves, as they’ve already started hinting about their desire to make more Crash games, and in the same breath they’ve hinted at other IP’s getting the same HD treatment.
Rumors, teases, and appeals for a proper HD remake of the original Crash Bandicoot games were prevalent for years until it finally happened, so the same doesn’t seem so impossible for Spyro. Of course, as many other speculators have pointed out by now, Spyro is a little different because he’s currently part of the mega-popular Skylanders series. It’s hard to imagine an HD remake of a character who is still active in a mainstream series, and that might make an HD Spyro seem more like a dream than a reality, but it could still make sense. After all, Activision made Crash a playable character in Skylanders: Imaginators months before N. Sane Trilogy was released, and I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming success of the trilogy has elevated Spyro’s to a near inevitability. Activision still owns the rights to Spyro, and if the report of their scrapped games in 2014 is to be believed, then it’s already been proven that they were thinking about Spyro in the same way as they were Crash.
A Crash follow-up in the form of Spyro just makes sense, but if all we’re doing is getting our hopes up only to be let down, my only wish is that at the very least Spyro doesn’t continue to be stifled by the likes of The Legend of Spyro and Skylanders. He deserves more than that, just like Crash if not more so, but more than anything else our next dose of nostalgia after the N. Sane Trilogy just won’t be the same if it’s not with Spyro.
Please let Spyro HD be a thing, Activision. This is your moment! Don’t screw it up!
Joy+Sticks Gaming 