Gamers have once again proved that they do not regret money for nostalgia. The British indie studio Bitmap Bureau has raised more than $95 thousand on Kickstarter to develop a retro Xeno Crisis shooter for the 16-bit Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console.
Kickstarter users helped Bitmap Bureau get three times the minimum budget of $27 thousand requested by the authors to implement their idea.
The game will be released on the original Sega Mega Drive cartridges. In addition, the authors plan to release versions for the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Switch consoles, as well as a digital version on PC.
Xeno Crisis will be released in October this year. It is timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the start of sales of the Sega Mega Drive in Japan, which began on October 29, 1988.
Xeno Crisis is a top—down shooter for one or two players, inspired by games such as Contra, Mercs, Chaos Engine, and other classics of the 16-bit era.
The last officially published game for Mega Drive is considered to be the Frogger arcade, which was released on the Sega console in 1998.
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- Atari showed the design of the retro Ataribox console
- Sega earned $833 million on video games in a year
Source: Kickstarter