How One Publisher Perfected Modern Sequels to Retro Games

In an era where big-budget, AAA projects continue to define the video game industry — for better or for worse — a few publishers and studios are making their mark using popular games from the past. Remakes and remasters proliferate year after year, some expected like Resident Evil, others long overdue like The Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, and still others shocking, like the PlayStation 1 era platforming relic Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos.

Other publishers are taking a different approach — toeing the line between “remake” and “reimagining.” Longtime Japanese developer Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020) was a “remake” in name only, using time bending and alternate reality tropes to both relive the original story while also serving as a sequel to the classic 1997 RPG — a concept that the developers doubled down on with this year’s follow up Rebirth.

Dotemu is a publisher that falls into a third category; instead of remaking classics, the publisher has found studios willing to make direct sequels that build on the foundations of the past. Streets of Rage 4 (2020) and Windjammers 2 (2022) brought familiar names back through time for older players, but in ways that adapted or improved upon what they’d done before, updating gameplay and visual aesthetics for a present day palate

It’s a philosophy of modernization over direct preservation, and it continues this month with Metal Slug Tactics. SNK’s war-themed side-scroller is back, but this time with a more tactical approach. The original Metal Slug games were arcade staples, from video rental stores to movie theater lobbies, and traditionally played like shooting games Contra or Gunstar Heroes. Dotemu’s new take on the game, however, plays more like a slower paced strategy game, despite retaining its classic pixel art look.

Ahead of the game’s release, Rolling Stone sat down with Aurelien Loos, CEO of Metal Slug Tactics developer Leikir Studio and the game’s creative director, as well as Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert, to talk about striking that balance between retro and modern, and why building on the classics is preferable to simply remaking what’s already been done.

Paying homage

From the beginning, the team at France-based Leikir Studio knew it wanted to adapt Metal Slug Tactics into a completely new format rather than make a new one in the same vein as before. “It would have been a little pretentious,” Aurelian Loos says. “We don’t know what we would have brought to the table, as run-and-gun isn’t our area of expertise.”

Tactical action and strategy games,like 2021’s Rogue Lords and June’s Sandwalkers, however, were “in [their] DNA” so when SNK and Dotemu came calling, the suggestion came naturally. “Metal Slug was already a very good setup for a tactical game, thanks to its military focus. It was the perfect fit, and it was also a way for us, as fans, to find a way to bring something new to the table while also being respectful of what the team had done in the past.”

SNK, for their part, supported Leikir’s efforts from the project’s inception. “When we went to Japan, [SNK illustrator] Tonko-san was really nice to us,” Loos says, “and everyone there really loved to see the universe taking life again in a different way.” Loos also says SNK’s blessing was “very important” to the team, as they were reassured when “the people working on the first, second or third game really liked what we were doing.”

Communications between the two sides was frequent, as Leikir was constantly bouncing ideas off of SNK and taking feedback from them into the developer’s room. As Loos describes it, “Sometimes, we’d ask for more information on a topic, like, ‘which parts of the IP to consider including’ or ‘we want to create a new character, do they fit into the IP?’ Things like that.” SNK wasn’t directly involved in production, but according to Loos, “it was really cool to work with them.

Same Look, Different Feel

In paying its respect to previous Metal Slug games, the team at Leikir suddenly found themselves facing another hurdle: adapting the SNK classic into this new genre, while also maintaining its beloved 2D sprite-based visual style. Changing that look, according to Loos, was never even considered.

“For us, Metal Slug is almost the definition of pixel art, so we can’t do anything more than that, it doesn’t make any sense, “Loos said. “We’d already decided on a new way to play in this universe, so it was really important to us to keep the soul of Metal Slug in — and that made the pixel art very, very important to us.”

However, choosing this route came with a myriad of pitfalls. For starters, the original Metal Slug games were fast-paced, 2D side-scrollers, so the sprite art only needed to consider certain angles of each character and object on the screen, and the pace meant that finer details in the art might get lost — especially in an age where CRT monitors ruled the arcades, not the HD screens of today.

A tactics game, as Cyrille Imbert points out, has a slower pace, which opens up time for players to analyze and appreciate the artwork. “We thought that it would be super cool for fans to discover those elements in a new dimension, or a new point of view,” Imbert explains. “Because of the rhythm of a tactical game, you have more time to really dive into that graphical universe and those cool specificities.”

Loos uses a specific enemy, the Aeshi Nero, as a prime example of what the team is going for. In its original appearance in Metal Slug 2, the player only sees the jaw of this cobra-like tank, as it’s swallowing a tower while it travels upward from the bottom of the screen. When the player encounters Aeshi Nero in Tactics, however, the full tank is visible, meaning those sprite models need to be created.

For Loos and the team, despite the challenge, it was all part of the appeal of working on a new Metal Slug. “We are a very, very small team, and it was tricky to find the perfect fit between quality and quantity while being respectful of the IP,” Loos explains. “However, it was really, really fun to think about things like Aeshi Nero, and consider that, ‘Hey, it’s a big snake, a big robotic snake, and we need to create the back and everything else so it looks coherent.’”

It was a labor of love for Leikir, one that sometimes made them question their own sanity. “Sometimes in a production meeting,” Loos recalls, “we’d talk about making certain animation details, and someone else would say you’re crazy, it’s too much, why are you doing that?” The answer, Loos says, was simple: They didn’t have a choice. “That’s what creates the legacy of Metal Slug.”

Old names, new tricks

The legacies of older franchises is something Dotemu has dabbled in a lot — Metal Slug Tactics is only their most recent offering. Their portfolio of published games also includes games like Streets off Rage 4, Windjammers 2, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (2022) — all modern reimaginings of classic gaming franchises or archetypes, but without being direct remasters or remakes. They instead serve as present day sequels to franchises that ended decades ago.

That is, of course, by design. While it’s important to look back at gaming’s past, if it can be done with more modern sensibilities in mind, Dotemu and its CEO Cyrille Imbert will lead the charge. “We have to bring something new to the table,” Imbert said. “When we start a project, we ask ourselves if there is a specific need, and if so, how can we best answer it? For us, it’s to create something new, but in a way that captures the essence of what the original game was and delivers it in a modern way that people want to play.”

Not every project in Dotemu’s wheelhouse is a complete reinvention, however. Imbert gives two examples; one, Pharoah: A New Era (2023), was a remake of the 1999 city-builder for PC — “the original game was so good, doing it better would be hard.” Another, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (2017), did take a straightforward remake approach, but it also offered both the original and modernized visuals for players to choose between at will.

It’s the exact same gameplay, Imbert says, but with “such a nice coat of paint that it doesn’t feel like an old game. You can see it too, because you can switch from the 8-bit version to the HD version instantly and say, ‘Oh my god, I’m playing a 30-year-old game, and it feels amazing.’ It feels super modern in terms of level design, and in those cases it makes more sense to remake.”

Imbert doesn’t want anyone to think they’re leaving the classic behind, however. In his mind, playing these new, modernized entries can sometimes dredge up curiosity for gaming’s past in new players. “It’s always important to look back, not only in a way that would be outdated and hard to get into if you never played old school games, but in a way that’s easier to approach and more familiar,” Imbert says. “That’s how you get people interested, and if they’re interested, they’ll dig further into the IP and potentially test those older games.”

A form of preservation

Mining gaming’s history to reinvent old classics is indirectly a form of game preservation — a controversial video game industry topic in its own right. Imbert is a proponent of preserving gaming’s history, but he acknowledges that not enough was done in the past to make things easier for the present.

“Our industry is super young compared to other entertainment industries — cinema, music, theater — and they’ve had more time to ask themselves how they can preserve the [work] of the past creators,” Imbert remarks. “For us in the gaming world, the question came pretty late; the concept of ‘preservation’ needed something to preserve” — or, preservation efforts didn’t begin in earnest until there was enough content that needed preserving.

Imbert remembers first seeing preservation efforts in the late 2000s, with groups trying to save old consoles, games lost to time that cannot be legally played anywhere, design documents that show how these games were created in the first place, and more. However, as Dotemu has worked with more and more companies around the industry, he’s noticed that early gaming’s lack of preservation came down to a single depressing thought: Who cares?

“We’ve worked with many Japanese companies, and back in the Nineties, they thought ‘We don’t need to preserve our games because nobody cares,” Imbert says. “They lost so much data, so much source code, and all sorts of things like that, because for them, keeping it was time not well spent.”

In Imbert’s opinion, the tide began to shift in the early 2010s — nearly 40 years after companies like Atari established the industry — as companies began to realize the size of their portfolios and started to consider preserving them. “That’s when big companies started to think, not only should we keep the archives clean and safe so resources aren’t burnt or lost, but also, how could we bring those old titles back?” Imbert says. “That’s what people want, because now we have a history which we didn’t have before in our industry.”

Looking to the future via the past

Which parts of that gaming history would Leikir and Dotemu like to try and tap into next? For Aurelian Loos, it’s three classic RPG franchises he’s loved since he was a child. “The game that made me come to the industry was Secret of Mana,” Loos says, “but also Final Fantasy Tactics, and Suikoden 2.”

Imbert has plenty of games on his retro revival wish list, but there’s one in particular he’s not sure he’d ever be able to make happen. “I have so many fond memories of Dark Age of Camelot, which was my first MMORPG, and if I could bring that back in some way, at some point, I’d be super excited.”

He even already has the genre decided thanks to a recent indie hit: Valheim (2021), the base-building survival sim, gave Imbert “Dark Age of Camelot vibes,” and he thinks that may be the best approach to resurrecting that franchise without needing to develop an MMORPG to compete with the likes of World of Warcraft (2004) or Guild Wars 2 (2012). “There is something to do there to kind of bring back that Dark Age of Camelot spirit. Maybe that’s one way to do it that’s less ambitious than a full-on MMO, because that’s not an easy task, right?”

Whatever’s next for Dotemu, you can bet it will be rooted in gaming’s deep cut history in some way, even if it won’t look exactly like it did back then. Whether it’s gorgeously illustrated version of a game that still plays 1:1 like the original, or a visually true-to-form take on a franchise that’s adapted to an entirely new genre — whatever it is, players can expect yet another lovingly crafted medley of old meeting new.

Metal Slug Tactics is available now on all PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.