Factor 5 studio founder Julian Eggebrecht has been musing over the future of the Turrican series and thinks that a Mario Maker-style approach might be the way forward for new 2D entries in the franchise.
Turrican began life on personal computers before moving over to consoles like the SNES and Mega Drive, and after years of the rights being in limbo, we’re finally getting a collection of Turrican titles in the form of Turrican Flashback, which launches on Switch soon.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Eggebrecht ponders where the series could go next in the realm of 2D:
Realistically, the one thing which we’d love to do is a 2D Turrican, if this is really successful – a modern 2D version of Turrican. I don’t think I would want to go back into 3D as that’s quite frankly not something which really excites me anymore.
But a really nicely done 2D one, which would include the ability for people to do their own levels, similar to Mario Maker. I think the typical pitfall that you have, you have a different memory as the original makeup as the fans who experienced it, and they might want, especially with the Turrican games, it’s tricky, right? The first two Amiga Turricans, the original ones, feel vastly different than, say, Super Turrican 2, which was clearly an homage to the Japanese design style.
How do you cater to that? That’s always the problem. So I’d love to do something where everybody on the team does our version of what we want do with it – and in all likelihood it will probably feel like one of the old games – but then we also put in all of the tools for the fans. That would really excite me – and then I play a level that I’ve never seen, or somebody does a weird tweak or a mod which just basically does something completely new with the whole thing – that just blows my mind.
Of course, a 3D Turrican is also a possibility – and Eggebrecht reveals that it very nearly happened on the GameCube. A Space World demo was shown alongside what would eventually become Star Wars Rogue Sqaudron II: Rogue Leader, which he talks about a little:
It was a spiritual successor to Turrican called Tornado, which was basically attempting the whole Turrican-style free roaming levels in 3D. We got to the prototype stage, but then at the end of the day Nintendo basically said, we don’t think with your team size you can handle that – we were pitching that as a first party game. And they said, we really, really need Rogue Leader for launch – the only game that they knew at the time which would potentially make it for launch was Luigi’s Mansion. So we said let’s put Tornado on ice, and it never really came back off it. That demo is unfortunately, as far as I know, completely lost, because that would have only worked on a prototype GameCube and certainly early prototypes of Flipper and Dolphin.
Where would you like to see the Turrican series go next? Would you like to see an all-new 2D entry, or do you think it’s time for it to move into 3D, despite Eggebrecht’s reservations? Let us know with a comment below.