A Trip Down Memory Lane
News I did not expect hit my inbox yesterday when, like a summoned ghost of my ’90s childhood, a revived Argonaut Games announced it was remastering PS1-era platformer Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. If you’re not familiar, Argonaut was a British developer responsible for games like Buck Bumble, the original PS1 Harry Potter games, and Croc 1 and 2. The company also had a hand in the original SNES Star Fox. However, Argonaut hit the rocks and was liquidated in 2004, seemingly entering the dustbin of history forever. Until yesterday, that is, when the company came back from the dead to announce it was bringing back Croc.
Croc: A Personal Connection
Croc was the game that almost entirely responsible for my 6-year-old self begging Mum and Dad to buy a PS1 (it was also on PC and Saturn, but young me didn’t know that) back in 1999. I had seen the platformer in action at a friend’s house and knew—right there and then—that it was the greatest videogame ever made and I simply had to play it. I eventually got my PS1, but I never actually got Croc. Instead, I got Metal Gear Solid 1 and 007: Tomorrow Never Dies, setting me irrevocably on the path to becoming the person I am today.
Mixed Reactions and Future Expectations
The news of the remaster has me genuinely excited to actually find out if the game is any good. However, my so-called colleagues at PC Gamer have tried to poison my mind against it. When I gaily announced that the game was getting revived in the team Slack, the news was greeted with slander. “A game my old editor used to refer to as ‘a croc of shite,'” wrote Robin Valentine. “I was just typing croc of shite,” agreed Jake Tucker moments later. “I hear it’s a croc of shite,” veteran newsman Andy Chalk subsequently told me in an email. So they are all dead to me, but Croc is very much alive and coming to PC. It will even feature a “Crocipedia”—a glorious Croc archive like you can find in Nightdive’s Quake remasters.
There is no date on the remaster yet, or even a list of storefronts, which opens up the very funny possibility that Tim Sweeney has swept in to purchase some kind of time-limited exclusivity for Croc. I am sure we will hear more soon.
