Highlights
- Captain Blood, a long-lost swashbuckling adventure, is finally being re-released on current-gen consoles this Fall after years of delays.
- A collaboration between SNEG, Seawolf Studio, and General Arcade has brought visual improvements and HD graphics to the classic game.
- Captain Blood is a remake of a game from 1988, which follows Bob Morlock on an epic adventure through time and space to track down clones of himself.
After more than a decade in development hell, Captain Blood is finally getting a re-release. Publisher SNEG and developers Seawolf Studio and General Arcade announced the game to be coming to current-gen consoles, such as the Xbox Series, this Fall. In collaboration with Exxos, Didier Bouchon and Philippe Ulrich co-created Captain Blood in 1988 for the 8-bit and 16-bit computers of the era. The development of the Captain Blood re-release started in 2003 with one of the subsidiaries of the Russian software company Akella, which was one of the most popular publishers in the region at the time.
In 2000, Akella started one of Russia’s most prominent video game franchises, Sea Dogs, to which Captain Blood could be considered a spiritual successor. The first sequel, Sea Dogs 2, later became known as Pirates of the Caribbean after Disney acquired rights to the game as a marketing tie-in to the film franchise. Bouchon and Ulrich developed Captain Blood alongside the Exxos team, while Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) handled publishing responsibilities. Rather than being a standalone concept, Captain Blood was intended to be a spin-off of the Sea Dogs franchise, set to be titled Age of Pirates: Captain Blood and scheduled for release in 2006, but the project never got off the ground. It resurfaced again more recently in 2010 because the gaming community still wants more games about pirates, but Captain Blood still remained underdeveloped for years after.
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Numerous delays and legal issues pushed Age of Pirates: Captain Blood further into development hell, but although the spin-off suffered the fate of many games, the long-lost swashbuckling adventure is finding a new home on modern-era platforms. Courtesy of IGN, a new trailer has revealed visual improvements to Captain Blood‘s game capture and cinematics, while also confirming the re-release to be available on all current-gen consoles this Fall. When the game was first released in 1988, it was available on the biggest PC platforms at the time, including Atari ST, Macintosh, and Amstrad CPC. Now, players can enjoy Captain Blood with HD graphics on the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and Steam.
Captain Blood Reimagines Bob Morlock’s Swashbuckling Adventure Through Time and Space
Set in the 1980s, Captain Blood follows Bob Morlock, a game designer who finds himself transported into the game he created. Morlock chooses the nickname “Captain Blood” after the titular character in Michael Curtiz’s black-and-white film of the same name and goes on an adventure through time and space to track down five clones of himself accidentally created during a hyperspace incident. If he fails to kill the remaining clones, Captain Blood will sever all ties to the human species and be lost to his self-made digital realm forever.
Seawolf Studio, the main driving force behind the re-release, appears to be a relatively new studio. As for General Arcade, the self-proclaimed video game engineering specialist worked on Baldur’s Gate 3, the Endless Space franchise, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and the Alien: Isolation Collection, among other A-list titles. SNEG has released many video games fashioned after the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game, but also published the Close Combat franchise and lent a helping hand to other indie games.
