New Little Big Adventure game is a reboot and may be released in 2024
The developers who previously announced a sequel to the Little Big Adventure games from the 1990s now say it will be a reboot of the first part. The game is planned to be released in 2024. That’s thirty years after the first part.
Didier Chanfray, who was involved in the original Little Big Adventure games and also works at the studio set up last year to create a new part, gives explanation about the exchange rate. He says the team has decided to create a “strong new IP” around LBA and not just come up with LBA3. There was already a partial story ready for LBA3, titled Genesis of the Stellar Entity. That script was written to end the series and the studio now says it doesn’t want to do that.
That’s why the studio decided to reboot the game. Details are not yet known, but it is a new start of the series. Not for a remake of the original or a successor to the second part. Chanfray says some fans will be disappointed that there’s no third installment, but he thinks a reboot is the best future for the series. Last year, the studio released the source code of the original games already made open source and fans are invited to work with it themselves to make mods, for example.
Chanfray hopes to release the new game in 2024. In that year, the LBA series celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. He does say that much is still unknown, so it is not a firm commitment. The team wants to be open about the development and collaborate with the community. The studio plans to make the reboot with a production team of about 12 people. Both the team and budget will be smaller than those for the 1997 production of LBA2. By hiring ‘the right people’ and using ‘new technology’ Chanfray believes that this will not come at the expense of quality.
Earlier this month, the makers already announced a new name for the game: Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure. That was a suggestion from the community. The original games had different names in different regions. LBA1 and LBA2 were released in the United States as Relentless and Twinsen’s Odyssey. The new name should merge those different names.
The first Little Big Adventure game appeared in 1994 for MS-DOS and later for Sony’s PlayStation. Half a million copies of the first volume had been sold by 1999. The successor was released in 1997 for Windows and MS-DOS. When the games first came out they were seen as progressive. These are action-RPG-style games with a semi-open world, storyline, humor and an autosave system. The latter was new at the time.
Little Big Adventure 1 and 2