The name of deceased game developer/publisher Accolade has resurfaced this week in the promotional material for a new game in the similarly moribund Bubsy series: Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, expected to launch later this year on the PC and the PlayStation Network.
This is strikingly odd for a number of reasons, not least of which that both Accolade and the Bubsy franchise have been presumed dead since the turn of the millennium.
The last Bubsy game, Bubsy 3D, was released on PlayStation in the late '90s; Accolade published the game and effectively folded not long after, with most of the company being acquired by Infogrames and rolled up into Infogrames North America.
It's tricky to suss out what happened to all of Accolade's properties (from Fight Night! to Barkley Shut Up and Jam! to Law of the West) in the years since. U.S. firm Tommo Inc. seems to have acquired most of them, and itself rereleased (under its Retorism brand) the first two Bubsy games on Steam in 2015 as a two-pack (or rather, a Two-Fur).
The current return of Bubsy appears to be the work of Tommo (as publisher), German studio Black Forest Games (Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams) and a revivified Accolade, which now has a website explaining that "Accolade is back!"
Incidentally, veteran game dev and Bubsy creator Michael Berlyn shared the series' origin story in a 2005 chat with Gamasutra.
"I saw this game called Sonic the Hedgehog and said to myself, 'Oh, I can really get into this, I can really see something," said Berlyn, who was working for Accolade when the first Sonic game came out. "So I played Sonic for nearly 14 hours a day for a week. I was just overwhelmed by it. And out of that came Bubsy."