Last year brought welcome news of a comeback of a beloved name in gaming, and in tandem with that news the revelation, to me at least, that another famous name in video games wasn’t perhaps as dormant as I’d thought. With the release of Turrican Flashback later this month – a collection of the much-loved run-and-gunner series’ highlights – we’re not only seeing the return of the Turrican name, but also of developer Factor 5, the famed outfit behind the Rogue Squadron games and countless other fascinating projects that sadly shut down in the tumultuous wake of Lair’s release.
Turrican FlashbackDeveloper: Factor 5, Ratalaika GamesPublisher: Inin/Strictly Limited GamesPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out January 27th on PS4 and Switch
“We never split just because the studio shut down here in the US,” studio founder Julian Eggebrecht tells me from his Marin County base. “[The studio in Cologne] stayed open in many ways, and we just pivoted from game making to video-on-demand services. While the company was going through the bankruptcy, I got in contact with Netflix, and we got a lot of the early clients for all of the streaming tech back in 2009 – and then pretty much all of those streaming apps that you’ve been using on consoles and lots of other platforms as well.”
It’s heartening to know that, without even knowing it, there’s been a little piece of what was once Factor 5 on the various consoles I’ve owned over the years – and I’m sure it was a lucrative turn for Eggebrecht and co. too. “We did that for a decade,” he says, “and it wasn’t the worst bet!”
That success led to a new chapter in the team’s story that began last August. “What has kind of been Factor 5 the past 10 years joined Epic together,” says Eggebrecht. “We still have our old structure in that half of the team is in the Bay Area, and the other half of the team is in Cologne. I’m basically leading the whole group, which is nowadays the media tech and services group inside Epic, here from California.”
Turrican – Offical 30th Anniversary Trailer – The Return of a Legend Watch on YouTube
As exciting as all that is, it’s the side hustle Eggebrecht and his team have been set free on that’s perhaps of most interest, and the return of Turrican is something that’s been almost quarter of a century in the making. “We needed to sort out a tonne of rights, because the situations around those games were a complete nightmare,” says Eggebrecht. The final resting place for many of those rights ended up being at the now defunct THQ, and it was the publisher’s downfall that presented an opportunity to Factor 5.