Today in "games we never expected to get a remake" is Radical Heights, the second and final game by Cliff Bleszinski's studio Boss Key Productions. A group of fans has banded together on Discord to give the 80's battle royale another chance at life.
What's the story behind Radical Heights?
The story of Radical Heights is one about jumping on trends in an attempt to save a studio. LawBreakers, a first-person shooter and the first game released by Boss Key Productions, managed to get a positive reception but wound up losing the studio money. As a result, the team decided to move away from supporting LawBreakers and released Radical Heights, a battle royale game with a 1980's aesthetic, in April 2018. The game, which was in what was dubbed "X-Treme Early Access," was pretty divisive, with some, including TechRaptor's founder, loving it. On the other hand, plenty of players were riffing on the game's extremely unfinished nature, which included missing textures, wonky physics, and many seeing it as an attempt to cash in on more popular battle royale games. On May 14, 2018, about a month after Radical Heights released, Cliff Bleszinski announced that Boss Key is shutting down, and the trademark for Radical Heights was acquired by Squanch Games.
What do we know about the remake and those working on it?
According to @ddanel, an admin on the remake's Discord, a Redditor known on multiple platforms as Liamkirt is the only one working on developing the game. There are others in support roles for the project, however, assisting with jobs like handling the project's Twitter account or serving as admins for the Discord. Liam has been working on the project for nearly a year now and has posted clips of his progress online. It's slow going, but Liam is primarily focused on working on the core mechanics before getting into major map development. Some of the features recently added include new weapons, a full-fledged first-person view, and ragdoll effects for when characters die.
As for the legal elephant in the room, the rules/please read channel acknowledges the major legal hurdle for the remake's development. "Regarding the future and legality of recreating the game there is one issue in the way, Radical Heights got rebought by Squanch games," says admin @Gooph. "So pleases stay patient as we will hopefully hear updates in the near future from Liam." There's no word yet on when we might hear about the resolution of this potential project-killer.
You can follow the progress of the Radical Heights remake on their official Twitter, Reddit, or Discord.
