What does Argonaut’s studio structure look like? Are you all in an office together somewhere, or working remotely? Mike: We’re primarily the modern remote model, scattered all over the world. I’m in Dallas, Texas, Jez is (usually) in London, Gary is in California. We have team members in Houston, Vancouver. The core development team is in Australia and they do all sit in an office together. Beyond that, we bring in other people, almost always folks we have worked with before over the decades, for specific roles. We’re very much a “boutique” publisher, which is just a fancy way of saying that we’re small. If Croc is successful and we develop more games concurrently, we’ll need a few more people to lend a hand.
Gary: But we never want to choose our team members based upon their commutable radius from a physical office in a specific place in the world.
Argonaut self-published the Croc remaster. Why go the fully independent route? Mike: The old publisher model that we worked under back when Croc was originally released just doesn’t apply anymore, particularly to a smaller developer. The big publisher would typically fund the game’s development, and provide services such as publishing, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, PR and QA, in exchange for a big chunk of the revenue, to cover the cost of all those employees. But now, when the vast majority of the revenue is sourced from digital rather than physical, the publishing, manufacturing, and distribution has essentially gone away. Marketing isn’t what it used to be. Big spends on print magazines, TV commercials, and even the trade shows like E3 have mostly disappeared or are not as relevant as they once were. Everything’s online, and we can do almost all of it ourselves. We have a PR guru, a social media manager, and if we need something like a trailer, we’ll hire a top video editor to cut it for us. Gary: That said, we do still have a physical product presence, but that’s mostly a niche collector’s market now. We partnered with Rock It Games for a really cool Croc Collector’s Edition, which includes a bunch of things in a gorgeous box, for PS5 and Switch. There’s also a “vanilla” version, with just the game. Those were a limited-time preorder last year.
Is the plan just to do more remasters going forward, or are you going to make and/or publish new titles as well? Gary: Obviously, we are best known for Argonaut’s back catalogue of games, whether that’s original IP such as Croc, Starglider and I-Ninja, or the big licensed games we did. We’ll look at remastering the games where we feel that there’s enough gamer demand to justify the investment to do so, and we will also be looking at new titles based on our IP. We’ve also had some discussions with stakeholders of the licensed IP about potentially remastering some of those titles in the future, although it’s hard to get everyone to agree when there are multiple stakeholders involved, which is sometimes the case.
Mike: When we announced last August that Argonaut was returning, we had lots of people reach out to us, some of those being developers who were inspired by our original games and entered the industry partly due to their influence, who want to work with us on either a reboot or extension of an existing Argonaut IP, or on something new, and we’re definitely open to those opportunities, if it’s a good fit.
Gary: We’ve also invested in a small developer called Ancient Machine, who have created a narco-thriller adventure game called Vice Undercover which should ship this summer on PC. Ancient Machine is headed up by Cos Lazouras, who we’ve all known and worked with multiple times since the early 1990s. Cos is probably most well known for the Riddick games, and for running Vin Diesel’s games production company Tigon Studios. We loved Vice Undercover, and we’re hoping that it will find its audience. We hope people will wishlist it on Steam and support it!
This last one is for my inner child, who never got to finish the original release due to a bad disc scratch incident. Should we expect a Croc 2 remaster? Jez: We’ve made no secret of the fact that if Croc does well in the market that the obvious next project is to remaster Croc 2.
Mike: Croc 2 was built in a different engine from Croc, and the remastering approach is also a little different. We’ve done some early R&D to validate our approach, and it’s looking like it will work well, so assuming we greenlight it from the commercial and financial side, we’re confident that it will be another step forward from what we achieved with Croc.
Gary: I started collecting Croc 2 Crocipedia stuff where possible when researching Croc, but actually many of the team who worked on Croc 2 didn’t work on Croc, so I’ve got a bunch of new people to track down and convince to start rummaging through their cobweb-covered boxes of papers and discs, and hearing their development stories. I’m looking forward to it!
Mike: You know, you could try a damp cloth and a blob of toothpaste on that scratched disc … It might just buff right out.
June/July 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 29
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