Why a card battler for a Hard Edge revival?

Today I thought I'd touch on why we took such a big jump with the Hard Edge IP (originally sold as T.R.A.G. in North America) that was originally action-adventure by making it a card battler this time around.

Hang around if you want a behind-the-scenes look into Sunsoft.

Some of you know, the game brand Sunsoft has been around a LONG time.

The first games we created were released in 1978 for arcades.

You might have heard of or played some of our more popular games like Blaster Master or Journey to Silius. We're incredibly proud to have been a part of such a cool period of game history.

As a result, we have quite a few IPs in our inventory to maintain.

For a while, that meant treating the old games and IPs like a relic, like something to keep in pristine condition and showcase in a museum, behind glass.

In a lot of ways, this is the right thing to do. However, old Golden Age Sunsoft was not quite like that. When you look at our whole line up of games, there are a lot of goofy games in there, and experimental games, and a good amount of flops. They never stopped challenging themselves.

Steam post image Image from the time we accidentally developed the game for hardware even older than the original “Hard Edge(T.R.A.G)”. Of course, that's just a joke—this piece was actually fan art created by one of our Sunsoft staff members.

In 2023, we announced that "Sunsoft was back!" and since then we've started taking more risks, started experimenting with more modern genres, and generally reviving the spirit of Sunsoft, and not just the games.

Ikki Unite lead the way with this endeavor. Featuring an online 16 player Vampire Survivor-like version of Ikki, which is our beloved token goofy series with its history of being a classic kuso-game (bad game) in Japanese game history.

Next was Ripple Island: Kyle and Cal's Restaurant, which took the heartwarming, charming world of Ripple Island and turned it into a online co-op restaurant management frenzy.

The creators of the original Hard Edge took risks as well, creating an all new game in a genre that was new at the time, with a team of younger employees. It's might not be our most well known IP, but it is one of our standouts to us, and features some great, slightly goofy characters(our favorite!). We wanted to revive it with a bang, with a genre our director knows and loves well.

Steam post image Fan art created by one of our programmers. Everyone here at Sunsoft loves our games and characters dearly.

At the same time, please look forward to more ports of our past games on new consoles, as well as more straightforward sequels! That's always also ongoing with our more experimental games like this one.

That's it for today.

Hope to see you again soon for the demo!💃