Blizzard bring back The Lost Vikings, Rock N' Roll Racing, and Blackthrone
Remember 'em?
In celebration of their 30th year, Blizzard today announced they're re-releasing three of their oldest games: Rock N Roll Racing, The Lost Vikings, and Blackthorne. These are coming fancied-up a bit in the Blizzard Arcade Collection, with features variously including rewinding and extra levels, plus a 'museum' of old development assets and interviews. It's out now on PC, though currently only if you buy Blizzard's big bundle of BlizzCon goodies.
The collection has the three games in their original versions as well as fancier new Definitive Editions. The Lost Vikings and Blackthrone will let you save anywhere, as well as a 'watch mode' which lets players watch playthroughts then jump in and take control when they want. And they're all rounded out with collections of "game art, development assets, unused content, lore, interviews, and more."
1992's The Lost Vikings is a puzzle-platformer starring three burly boys who need to combine their different abilities. Its Def Ed is a blend of the different console versions, Blizzard say, "combining the superior audio and visual experience of the first release with the extra stages and cutscenes, and support for up to three players in local co-op, that were added in a subsequent version."/p>
Rock N' Roll Racing is a top-down murdercar game, first released in 1993. The Def Ed goes into 16:9 resolutions, bumps the splitscreen multiplayer count up from two to four, adds snow and rain, pops in extra tracks, slips in "actual recordings" of songs from the soundtrack, and whams in new songs and voiceover clips too.
And 1994's Blackthorne is a kinda Flashback-ish shooty platformer. Can't say I know this one. Its Def Ed adds an area only seen in the 32-bit version and a map that fills out as you explore.
I honestly don't have many memories of any of this - you keen for a return visit, gang?
The Blizzard Arcade Collection is "currently" exclusively only available on PC as part of Blizzard's Celebration Collection, a bunch of doodads for loads of their games, which starts at £16.79. You'd hope they'll sell it separately too? They're already selling it separately on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.