So I pitched for this. For those of you who don't know, once upon a time, I was working on a Bubsy thing, which was 25% a joke and 75% serious.
I started after watching this Digital Foundry video they put out for April Fools back in 2019. Despite being for April Fools, it's mostly a legitimate celebration of Bubsy, suggesting that by the standards of 1993, that first Bubsy game was actually pretty well-liked. There was something there.
I am obviously a Sonic fan. Have been all my life. And a game developer seemingly perpetually stuck in the "burgeoning" status. So many, many, many years ago, I reserved myself to the idea that I might not ever get to work on a Sonic game, and certainly not in any kind of important capacity. But I began to wonder if, in the mascot platformer rush of the 90's, if there wasn't some way I could still satisfy myself.
Bubsy, I think, was one of the few games that scratched the surface of "getting it right." The game eventually falls apart a few levels in, but there's a charm to Bubsy, and I think I'm not alone in realizing that. It's more than just shitposting and schadenfreude. Again, Digital Foundry wasn't wrong: people did at one point unironically like Bubsy. There was something about it that rose above the others. Mike Berlyn (RIP) knew what he was doing.
Friends and I joked about buying the Bubsy IP as far back as 2005, because we figured, at that point, it must have been cheap. And, in recent times, I'd even started rolling around the idea of something merely inspired by Bubsy called "Rude 'n' Tude" about two mascot platformer brothers (one named Rude, the other named Tude).
Following the Digital Foundry Bubsy video, I began working on something under the codename "Better Bubsy."
There's a long story behind why development was slow, but it was getting to the point where game developer friends were prodding me to submit this as a pitch to UFO Entertainment, who published the last two Bubsy games. But with my Mom getting sick and losing that HDD around the same time, it was slow and difficult work.
Then Atari buys the Bubsy IP and openly calls for indie devs. I kind of just dropped everything and lunged at it. I submitted everything I had whether it was good or not, and I'm not sure that was the best idea. But it was the best I had.
And now I am nervous and a little sad, because that was going on a week ago.