Disney's 27-year-old platformer Gargoyles is getting remastered
Another Xanatos gambit pays off.
Tucked away in the middle of the Disney & Marvel Games Showcase from the latest D23 Expo—a biennial event for the official Disney fan club, named for the year of the company's founding—was a quick announcement that another sidescroller would be getting the Disney Classic Games Collection treatment. Just like the platformers based on Aladdin, The Lion King, The Jungle Book, the 1995 Sega Genesis game Gargoyles is getting remastered.
Gargoyles was based on a mid-90s animated series that became a cult classic thanks to the relative maturity of its writing and plotting, as well as its intelligent and well-motivated villains. It also had a solid voice cast, including Keith David, Clancy Brown, John Rhys-Davies, and a bunch of Star Trek actors like Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, who played the bad guys David Xanatos and Demona. Though canceled after three seasons, Gargoyles has since been resurrected in comic books, and clearly still has fans.
The videogame, a 2D sidescroller in which the gargoyle Goliath fights, climbs, and flies across 18 levels to destroy "an artifact of incredible power and evil" made by Viking sorcerers, will be remastered by Empty Clip. That's the studio behind 16-bit brawler spin-offs Dead Island: Retro Revenge and Streets of Kamurocho, which reimagined the Yakuza games as something more like Streets of Rage 2.
Gargoyles Remastered doesn't have a release date yet, but according to Disney's press release it'll be coming to PC "with updated visuals and controls". The D23 Expo's Disney & Marvel Games Showcase also revealed that Midnight Suns is back on track with a December release date, Amy Hennig's upcoming Marvel game will feature Captain America and Black Panther in World War 2, and there's a Tron visual novel coming next year from indie studio Bithell Games, previously responsible for Thomas Was Alone, Subsurface Circular, and The Solitaire Conspiracy.