they generally didn’t have a compelling enough plan, or it was someone trying to vacuum up old game IP with no real passion for the games themselves. The whole retro games scene went into overdrive a few years ago, and before that Croc was perhaps still a bit too recent. Now, the original players have grown up and maybe have kids of their own, so we figured that it could appeal to fans of the original game but also introduce a new generation of gamers.
Mike: I’ve worked with a team based in Perth, Australia called Titanium Studios on multiple projects. For reasons we don’t fully understand, Australians have a disproportionate passion for Croc, maybe it’s something to do with Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin’s legacy, or maybe they just prefer a cute one rather than one which is going to try and eat them when they go swimming. Anyway, once Titanium’s MD Jayeson Lee-Steere found out that I knew Jez, he inquired about the possibility of being able to work on a Croc remaster. I explained that we’d actually discussed it a couple of years prior, and had even contacted the original programmers to see if they’d kept a copy of the source, but unfortunately nobody had so it was probably a non-starter. Jayeson took this as a challenge and a few days later he messaged
me and said “I’ve found the source!” It turned out that someone - and we don’t know who - had leaked the source code online, and then an unrelated hobbyist programmer who, coincidentally, is also Australian, had updated the code to make it run on Windows 10/11, made the music play without requiring CD-ROM audio, had added modern controller support, and made various other fixes. It made a big difference.
Why choose Croc, over other Argonaut classics like Starglider, Buck Bumble, or I-Ninja? Jez: Starglider was the game that originally put Argonaut on the map, and I definitely want to do something with it in the future as it’s my “first-born” ... but it’s primitive by comparison with later games, and almost 40 years old. How many people who play games in their 60s (or older) really remember it? I-Ninja is a really well-regarded and underappreciated game and we’d love to revisit it. Buck Bumble too, but that was N64-only so less people know about it. Croc, on the other hand, sold well over 3 million copies (back when that was a LOT of copies) and was the first big platformer on the original PlayStation console. It’s also got broad appeal, both to men and women. Croc really appealed to everyone. It was the obvious choice.
Mike: But we also hope that Buck Bumble will also have his day in the sun, eventually.
You’ve made changes to the graphics, the controls and the camera. What’s the rationale behind changing things in a re-release, and where do you draw the line? Mike: Well, when we start a remaster, we always have a discussion about how we can satisfy fans of the original and also appeal to the new players that are modern gamers. In the case of graphics, it’s expected
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that a good remaster will have upgraded graphics, so that’s an easy decision. We upgrade wherever we can, taking into consideration what source art and tools we have available to us to work from. For Croc, we had the source code, but we didn’t have the source
assets, including all the art at all, so we were limited in what we could do, especially as this was a remaster and not a remake. We built some custom polygon upscaling tools which allowed us to keep the original style, while modernizing the graphics. The upside to this is that the remaster keeps Croc’s iconic look. We modernized, but not too much. We were always mindful of not wanting to lose the original aesthetic of the game. Additionally, we added a whole roster of options so fans of the original game can play with a more retro look if they want to. With the camera and controls, we knew from day one that this was
the biggest complaint about the original game. With many years more experience in game development since Croc originally came out, we had some solid ideas about how the controls could be modernized. The original controls were tank style on the D-pad. Gamers today expect a modern implementation of dual-stick controls, but since there are purists who want the game as it was, we left the tank controls on the D-pad so you get the best of both worlds. In the case of the camera, we couldn’t really offer the original camera
exactly as-was, because it wasn’t great. We decided that since nobody would ever really want to select it, that we’d not include the original implementation. I think the upgrades were well received by the original fans of Croc and we’re really happy that they appreciate what we’ve done.
What sort of remaster is it on a technical level? Mike: We were very fortunate that we had located the original PC source code and were able to work from that. It’s not 100% essential any more, with the modern decompilation tools available, but for a game like Croc, where we were targeting originality, I think it’s really important to work from the original code to really preserve the correct feel of the game. We just add all the modern stuff on top. We have a modern rendering engine that we used, as well as proprietary tools which are collectively called the Zetta Engine, to bind to the original code. Zetta handles the rendering, audio, and input, as well as all the platform-specific tasks like trophies.
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