Some of the very best games on PlayStation 5 so far are old titles made new — so it’s fitting that Sony is officially acquiring Bluepoint Games, the acclaimed studio that specializes in remasters. It’s the team that brought us the Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes, as well as fantastic remasters of the first three Uncharted games, the cult-classic Gravity Rush, and both the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection for previous-gen consoles. Bluepoint was behind the excellent 2013 port of Flower to the PS4 as well.
That’s not the only reason Sony’s Bluepoint buy isn’t surprising though. The company spilled the beans in June when it bought Returnal developer Housemarque but accidentally uploaded an image showing a Bluepoint acquisition instead:
..so apparently PlayStation Japan uploaded the wrong image with their first tweet on Housemarque’s acquisition, and it actually mentions a Bluepoint acquisition pic.twitter.com/yQBHtLbG5c
— Nibel (@Nibellion) June 29, 2021
Perhaps we’ll see remasters and remakes more often with Sony’s additional resources, but the studio is also going to create its own games, according to a statement given to IGN. “Our next project, we’re working on original content right now. We can’t talk about what that is, but that’s the next step in the evolution for us.”
Sony’s under some pressure right now to show that it has killer content for the PS5, since every first-party game it promised to deliver in 2021 (save the great Ratchet and Clank) has been delayed. God of War: Ragnarok, Gran Turismo 7, and Horizon Forbidden West were all originally supposed to be 2021 releases, but even Horizon recently got pushed back to February. Third-party games have seen delays as well.
The company’s been shoring up its studios to make that happen — in addition to Housemarque and Bluepoint, it purchased Firesprite, developers of The Playroom.
Sony also recently announced a remake from another acclaimed remastering and porting studio: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is in development at Aspyr, perhaps best known for porting countless titles to Mac but also recently active in bringing older games to the Nintendo Switch. It’ll be console-exclusive to PS5. And as we spotted in May, Uncharted games are coming to PC… and PS5, too, with the new Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection that includes both Uncharted 4 and a very good spinoff in The Lost Legacy.
Between these and the return of N64 and Sega Genesis titles — they’re coming to Nintendo Switch Online — it’s a great time to love old games.
