Psygnosis is a publisher that many older gamers will remember fondly, from their 16-bit shooters Awesome and Blood Money to the PlayStation classics Colony Wars, G-Police and WipEout.
The number of classic games the company published is quite staggering and includes Lemmings, The Killing Game Show, Destruction Derby, Amour-Geddon, Walker and Rollcage, and who can forget Agony, the worlds first shoot ’em up featuring an Owl, a video of which you can see above.
In 1999 the publishing branch of the company was merged into Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Psygnosis was gone, renamed as Sony’s Studio Liverpool, a team who worked solely on the WipEout franchise until their closure in August last year
Now the interesting part; Sony has registered the trademark for Psygnosis, the reasons for which are unclear but it may have something do a certain PlayStation 4 game, namely Shadow of the Beast, a title that was originally published by the company.
The Psygnosis brand was famous for pushing technical boundaries (Shadow of the Beast was considered revolutionary due to the layers of parallax scrolling), pre-rendered ray traced intro movies, Roger Dean artwork, and rather hefty prices – Shadow Of The Best cost a whopping £35 back in 1989 which is around £75 in today’s money.
Could Sony be bringing the label back to showcase the power of the PS4, perhaps as a premium label for games that really push the console? If so, can we finally have a new version of G-Police please Sony? Perhaps bundled with PS4 VR headest next year?
Of course this may just be some legal requirement that allows Sony to retain copyright to older titles, again this may be linked to new version of Shadow of the Beast, but with such a huge library of classic games it would be a shame if the name was re-registered just because a lawyer required it.
Source: NeoGAF
The Von Braun
Ending of G-Police 2 set up a sequel, so it’d be great to see that on PS4.
Colony wars:I’m a huge fan of 1st 2, not so much Red Sun and Sony did toy with a PS2 game, which would have been part of their spearhead for taking PS2 online..but nowt came of it.
I’d also like to see Overboard 2 on PSN as well.
TheShepanator
lemmings was a brutal game
Wardy-77-
Would be great to see Psygnosis make a return,many a great title from my childhood Destruction Derby 2 being up there with Wipeout and Rollcage.
MuggleMind
That would be brilliant. Maybe I can finally finish Brataccas – I remember getting stuck, thinking I’d play it later, and then my Atari ST dying on me. Couldn’t afford a new one at the time – so the game was never completed.
NotSmartEnough
Loved WipeOut, own them all except 2048 (where’s my vita tv?). Both Rollcages were great. Love to see next-gen updates of both. Gutted that WipeOut ps4 got canned along with studio Liverpool.
“can we finally have a new version of G-Police please Sony? Perhaps bundled with PS4 VR headest next year?”
Now that you’ve put that thought in my head you’re obliged to make it true: Flying between neon-soaked skyscrapers in a Havok in VR? Where do I pre-order?