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 (which had one of the most inexplicable themes of all time), the original PS1 Harry Potter games, and, well, Croc 1 and 2. It also had a hand in the original SNES Star Fox, which is where you'll know the studio from if you know it at all.
Alas, Argonaut hit the rocks when it was liquidated in 2004, entering the dustbin of history seemingly forever. Until yesterday, when for reasons I don't quite follow the company came back from the dead to announce it was bringing back Croc, baby.
Which is great news for me. Croc was the game that was 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'd seen the platformer (which, now that I think of it, is quite a lot like Spyro) in action at a friend's house and knew—right there and then—that it was clearly 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 man I am today. The news of the remaster, then, genuinely has me a bit excited to actually find out if the game is any good.
That is if my so-called colleagues at PC Gamer don't poison my mind against it first. When I gaily announced that the game was getting revived in the team Slack, the news was greeted with slander and calumny. "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're all dead to me, but Croc is very much alive and coming to PC, and it'll even feature a "Crocipedia"—a glorious Croc archive like you can find in Nightdive's Quake remasters—to spread the word of Croc. There's no date on it yet, or even a list of storefronts, opening up the very funny possibility that Tim Sweeney has swept in to purchase some kind of time-limited exclusivity for Croc, but I'm sure we'll hear more soon.
Update: This piece has been amended to note that the original Croc also released on the PC and Sega Saturn.
