Gary: Early on in production, I’d noticed that Scott Butler, Croc’s lead artist had previously posted some images on his Instagram feed from a folder of character sketches drawn by Simon Keating, the character designer who came up with the look of Croc as we know him today, as well as the other wacky creatures who inhabit the game. I thought “it’d be cool if we put those in the game’s front end somewhere, as a sort of mini digital museum”, and we also wanted to arrange to record a few interviews with Jez and some of the team members.
You’ve also included the Crocipedia, a treasure trove of long-lost development materials. Where did you get that stuff? Gary: I knew a handful of people on the Croc team from me having worked with Argonaut on other projects over the years. I didn’t work on the original Croc when I was at Fox, so I literally started with the list of credits, and started contacting some of the Argonaut people I did know, encouraging them to get in touch with the ones I didn’t know, or to ask them to approve my LinkedIn connection requests. Then once I’d made “first contact” I’d usually jump on a WhatsApp call and just chat to them about their experiences. Some people would say they couldn’t remember much, but the funny thing is that the more you talk, the more the brain seems to recall, and suddenly they’re telling these interesting development anecdotes that they hadn’t thought about for more than 25 years. Then I’d hit them with the big question: “So did you keep anything
Croc-related? Documents? Drawings? Merch? Anything?” and for quite a few people, they said they didn’t keep anything, or they didn’t know where they might have put it. Sometimes, weeks, or even months later, I’d get a message out of the blue like “I was clearing out my garage and I found a box of stuff!” and we’d put all of that into the Crocipedia. The massive game design document came via former Argonaut General Manager John Edelson. It’s an inkjet printout and the only copy known to exist. Incredibly, his house in Florida had been very badly damaged by a hurricane some years ago, and this was one of the things which had survived. What are the odds?! There had been rumours of there having been a Croc cartoon series
in development at Fox, that people had been discussing online for over 20 years trying to find out if it were true or just a myth. I got in touch with Flint Dille who I actually knew had written the treatment for the cartoon, and he didn’t think he had a copy. Then a week later he did a deep dive into the Dille archives, and found a partially corrupted email backup, from which he was able to recover about 90% of the document, and we then reconstructed that into something legible and presentable. All in all the Crocipedia research took about 18 months of chatting, cajoling and pleading to bring together. For British readers of a certain age, I often felt like I was the old man going into bookshop after bookshop searching for a copy of ‘Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley’.
Was it always a part of the vision for the package, or did the idea come up later in development?
28 | MCV/DEVELOP June/July 2025
Mike: So we hired Paul Provenzano, who was the Fox Interactive EP on Croc (and our boss at the time) who has a history as a filmmaker and documentarian, and he conducted what ended up being seventeen interviews which comprised the Crocumentary section of the Crocipedia. Paul actually interviewed himself for one of them! Once Gary started accumulating all this content, we had to completely rethink that part of the project’s scope as it became much bigger than we could ever have imagined it would be at the outset. I’ve worked on quite a few remasters before Croc, and we never even thought to do what we did with creating the Crocipedia. My advice to any developers now is “archive everything, you never know when it might be needed!”
Was there anything you wanted to include in the Crocipedia that you couldn’t? Gary: Yes, there are a few things that we think are still out there, but haven’t been able to track down yet. There were a couple of original team members who were unable to participate for either personal or professional reasons, and it’d be nice to get them to contribute their stories in interview form at some point. We did find some visual content after the game content was locked last Autumn, and we’re putting those things into the next patch … and there’s one thing that is our Holy Grail, that everybody thought had been lost forever, but we think we might have a lead. I don’t want to say any more and jinx it, but if it happens, it’ll be a pretty big story.
What has the reaction to the remaster been like overall? Mike: It’s been quite amazing, really. Last August when we announced the return of Argonaut Games after 20 years away, and that our first game was going to be a Croc remaster, the reaction was quite emotional for the public, and for us. Things like “I’m crying reading this!” to “Croc was the first video game I ever played.” and then in October we had a “Croctober” event on Twitter where we shared something new every day for the entire month and people started to see how much passion we put into the game. It’s been really good. Of course, there are always people who didn’t like the original game and won’t warm to remasters regardless of what we have done, but you can’t please everybody.
Gary: We put out a patch on all platforms recently, addressing some of the things people had reported back, as well the usual bug fixes, and the community really seems to appreciate that we listen to their feedback and do our best to address valid concerns where possible. The next patch is going to really lean into that.
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