The bobcat Bubsy is alive after decades of hibernating in some vat of nuclear waste, I bet, with the upcoming Bubsy 4D from Atari and Fabraz – the indie studio behind perfect platformer Demon Turf – which looks delightful as long as I'm ignoring my fight or flight response. Atari CEO Wade Rosen seems to have shared a similar slow burn with Bubsy, speaking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2025 to tell us more about how the unexpected sequel to 1996's unpopular Bubsy 3D came to be.
"We had some early signs that there was, like, kind of this ground swell for Bubsy," recalls Rosen. "We bought back the IP – we bought that back with 100 other games, but, for two minutes on Good Morning America, the day after we bought it, they just talked about Bubsy.
"They didn’t reach out to us, didn't get a comment from us. They just found a press release and talked about Bubsy for two minutes."
This was in 2023. In the segment, the Good Morning America hosts generously recount the time a Bubsy TV show was canceled after one episode, when a critic said "it was terrible from beginning to end, Bubsy's voice is so annoying that it can kill your brain cells. But hey, nostalgia is in, baby. This could be Bubsy's big second chance, you guys."
Amen to that. The sentiment made Rosen think, "'Is this a nationally known IP?'" he says. Eventually, he gave in to Bubsmania – "I was like, 'OK, all right, I guess there's something here.' People genuinely have a real affinity for this thing.
"But when we were looking at doing it, we said, 'If we're gonna do it, we have to do it right.' [...] Let's find a dev team that can absolutely crush it."
Rosen loves PS2-era platformers ("I mean, I like platformers all the way," he says, "but I feel like those PS2-era platformers were so cool"), so after his team brought him Demon Turf to play, he knew that, "'Yeah, I think these are gonna be the guys. This feels right with Bubsy.' And, thankfully, we got that in place. They've been a joy to work with." A match made in… wherever bobcats go instead of heaven.
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