Silicon Knights’ 2002 horror classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem has been locked to the Nintendo GameCube since 2002, but game director Denis Dyack would love for the game to make an official comeback via Nintendo Switch Online or any other means.
In an interview with Kiwi Talkz to promote his upcoming free-to-play co-op game Deadhaus Sonata, Dyack explained that he would love to see the game make a return if Nintendo wanted the game to come back.
“I would work Miyamoto any time,” Dyack said regarding an official remake or re-release of Eternal Darkness. “Those are some of the best people we ever worked with, and I think that when you tap into a cultural zeitgeist like we did with Eternal Darkness, the culture changes.”
Dyack explained that, while a remaster or remake of Eternal Darkness would be fine, the game could do a lot more. As it stands right now, the game does feature some quirky elements that don’t necessarily tie into a modern setup with CRT volume effect gags and other features that could be portrayed better today.
“We would have to do different things,” the game director said, “but you can do more effective things now with social media and the way things are working now, all kinda of crazy things that you can do that would be super awesome. We often joke about sanity effects and stuff like that, what we would do today, and so there’s a lot of potential for sure.
“And then that begs the question, would you want to remake it or why not just do a sequel, or another game, hate to say sequels, another game in the Eternal Darkness universe.”
As for who could remaster Eternal Darkness, that is unknown. In the past, developers have revealed that approaching Nintendo to work on their older properties for remasters and remakes has been a major challenge.
“We’ve had discussions with Nintendo over the years about remastering a number of their games and they always get gun shy working with 3rd party developers even after Nightdive Studios released the first N64 games on their platform,” Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick said on Twitter a few years back, adding that “Eternal Darkness is #1 on my list BTW”.
At the time of publication, there has been no official confirmation or even any leaks surrounding a return for Eternal Darkness. However, when asked if Nintendo is waiting for the “right time or right developer”, Dyack responded “there’s details there I can’t talk about”. Very curious, indeed.
Whatever the case, hopefully, Eternal Darkness will be able to return in some form to modern gamers, likely on the Nintendo Switch 2’s NSO GameCube library. However, with remakes of everything from Silent Hill 2 to Fatal Frame 2, maybe Nintendo will give the iconic horror game a little bit of extra love with a full-on remake.
