Predictions for the new Bubsy game

So Bubsy is coming back. Bet you didn’t see that coming, eh? I know I certainly didn’t. Hot on the heels of Sonic Mania comes Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back. What a mess this looks to be.

Bubsy has been synonymous with failed mascot characters for over two decades and, probably, it should have stayed that way.    Accolade, the publisher of the original Bubsy games, was also brought back for the announcement. You’d be forgiven for assuming that the announcement was just a joke, given how unlikely the entire scenario is.

“Accolade is back from hell, and they’ve dragged Bubsy back with them!” – A real, actual thing that’s happening.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the decision to revive this long-dead series was not founded out of love for an extinct franchise but rather made specifically to generate enough press to trick people into buying a bad game. There is money to be made in exploiting a franchise’s memetic status. PC World wrote an oddly prescient article on the subject 8 years ago that gives several examples of how some viral content producers were able to cash in and start making money hand over fist. Sure, some of those jokes got driven into the ground but lets be honest, that happens to just about every internet joke after a year or two.

What Accolade apparently missed from that article was one piece of advice that would have saved them a lot of trouble: Don’t force it.

From the look of it, the new Bubsy game is a cash grab that exploits the franchise’s infamous status as a failed series. It’s going to be a cheaply-made piece of shovelware designed specifically for the meme money. People will buy it, just to see how awful it actually is, and Accolade will recoup their development costs. Within a month or two, when the streamers and lets plays stop, the game will be forgotten and the franchise will return to the trash, where it belongs.

And frankly? That goodbye can’t come soon enough.