Eggebrecht: Factor 5 Working On Turrican Concepts

Author: by Brandon Sheffield, Staff

As part of an in-depth interview with Gamasutra published today, Factor 5 (Lair) president Julian Eggebrecht has revealed that the firm is working on concepts for the return of the Turrican franchise. When asked about the much-rumored return of the action game series, which started on the Commodore 64 in 1990, and appeared in several side-scrolling 2D iterations for consoles, but never spawned a 3D version, Eggebrecht commented: "We've been concepting quite a bit internally. That's another universe creation thing. I was looking at Metroid Prime's reinventing of a franchise that had been out there for quite awhile, and we're facing the same thing with Turrican. There's aspects of the old games where people will feel betrayed if we don't transform them into the next generation. On the other hand, there's other stuff which is simply cheesy, let's face it. I don't think gamers will accept those things anymore. It's a fine line to balance." When asked how the 2D gameplay would transition to 3D, the Factor 5 president added: "Yeah, 2D was all about world exploration in our games, but also about scale. That is one of the things we've transformed into our 3D games, where it's all about scale from macro to micro. I think some of these elements actually do apply, and they're quite different from what you've seen, say, in Metroid, which has a very rigid design." In the in-depth interview debuting today, Eggebrecht, whose company has also been responsible for the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron franchise for LucasArts, discusses their upcoming PS3 title Lair, design considerations for the Sixaxis, and exactly how his firm is using the PS3’s SPUs and RSX GPU.