There are two blue wolves inside you. One is actually a hedgehog, prone to loop-the-loops and drowning in caves. The other one is actually a dolphin, who is also prone to loop-the-loops and drowning in caves. Clarification: when I said you I meant me. I’m referring to my own squalid psychological architecture as a Sega Mega Drive player with vivid memories of Sonic the Hedgehog (especially the Star Light Zone) and Ecco the Dolphin.
While Sega’s pugnacious pinball mascot continues to star in videogames of all flavours, poor Ecco has been absent from screens since the early noughties. No longer: this year shall be the year of Ecco. Developers A&R Atelier – whose members include the character’s original creator, Ed Annunziata – have declared that they are working on “several” new Ecco things, including a videogame. No, I won’t accommodate any criticism of my framing here. If we can have a year of Luigi and a year of Shadow, we can have a year of Ecco.
New to Ecco? The original Mega Drive/Genesis games were 2D action-adventures in which you swam around beautiful pixel grottos, surfacing periodically for air and singing at other sea creatures and alien crystals. Wonderful, dreamy, frightening exercises in exploration and puzzling with a splash of ram-the-shark combat. The overarching storyline involves time travel and saving the planet. I have never played a swimming game with quite this ambience.
“It has been years in the making and we’re honored to bring Ecco back,” said Ed Annunziata, Chief Creative Officer of A&R Atelier. “Ecco has always been more than a game about a dolphin – he’s a bridge between worlds.” Oh god, please let that be a reference to the aforesaid storyline and not a hint about some Netflix transmedia merchandising op. In general: please let A&R Atelier not be some kind of shady cash-in operation. I’ve never heard of them before and they don’t have a proper website, at the time of writing.
We do already have some concrete indications of what those new Ecco projects are, concrete enough that the elusiveness of this week’s announcement feels slightly weird. In an Xbox Wire post from May last year, Annunziata revealed that “me and the entire original team are going to Remaster the original Ecco the Dolphin and Tides of Time games. Then we will make a new, third game with contemporary play and GPU sensibilities.” I also notice that the official Ecco the Dolphin site has a countdown on it, with approximately 2329 hours or 100 days to go.
While Ecco hasn’t attracted quite the same glut of fangames as Sonic, there are some preservation projects in the wilds, and a few Ecco homages on Itch.io. Annunziata has himself hosted an Ecco gamejam, though it was a private affair. If I were rebooting Ecco today, I would definitely be aiming to team up with some fangamers akin to the team behind Sonic Mania. Also, the new one had better not be 3D, you savages. We already have Subnautica at home.