Jens Andersson, the designer behind The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, would love to see the game brought back for modern platforms. While the game is still playable on PC, anyone attempting to play the stealth game needs to jump through countless hoops to get it running properly.
The brilliant movie tie-in game originally released in 2004, exclusively for the original Xbox. As Andersson explains in an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast, the game was “almost cancelled” by publisher Vivendi, but the team at Starbreeze scrapped its PS2 build and was able to finish its brilliant Xbox release.
During our interview, we asked Andersson if they’d like to see a remaster or remake of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, especially when the original game is such a pain to play.
“I would love to see that,” Andersson told us. “Sadly, the source code is lost.” While this used to mean that a remaster of a game was impossible, the designer explained that a remaster could become possible with the use of modern recompilation.
“In the last couple of days, we see a lot of reverse engineered code, so maybe there’s an avenue,” he added. “I think it would be amazing to get a proper remaster of Riddick. I think the gameplay and the story holds up. It’s way too janky, so I would like to see that fixed. But it’s still a good game, and it’s nice and short in many ways.”
While some AI-fuelled recompilations have been controversial, there have been some amazing recompilations in recent months. With reverse engineering, games can be made playable on any platform, and with talented developers behind them, these ports can be fantastic ways to re-experience missing games, such as Hideo Kojima’s P.T.
If Andersson was able to remaster or even remake Riddick, there are changes that they’d like to make to the game. While already a brilliant game, they explained that “it’s so stripped down because we didn’t have the rendering tech”. While the game’s PC version was improved, it’s not only still quite aged, but also a massive pain to run on modern computers.
“I could just imagine what we could have, you know, remaking Riddick in the Indiana Jones engine, for example,” Andersson said. “Like the both visual and in the immersion and all the controls, you know, combat systems. All that stuff would just be so much nicer.”
“I would base it on the PC version… because we fixed some big pacing issues on the PC version,” he continued. “I think there are two additional missions in there or something like that… We used it to fix the game.”
For Andersson, if The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was to be remastered or remade, they would want the game to be improved, but how players remembered it. “I wouldn’t change very much in terms of how you remember it,” he said. “I would just make that it the memory that you have of it be more vivid.”
Butcher Bay has already been remastered once in 2009, released alongside the sequel game Assault on Dark Athena. Unfortunately, that remaster proved controversial with many art changes that caused the original game to suffer. Hopefully, a future remaster will work from the original art assets, and bring fans a true return to the original game. (I’m counting on you, Nightdive!)
