The burlap, needle-armed doll Vince is making his way to Xbox One and Windows 10 in crisp HD next year.
Voodoo Vince, the debut release from Beep Industries, came out in 2003 for the original Xbox. The 3D platformer was met with warm yet tempered reviews.
“Voodoo Vince puts its own unique stamp on the genre by trading in most of the jumping and timing-based action for a lot of nicely done puzzle-solving,” Jeff Gerstmann wrote in his review for GameSpot.com.
Ultimately, the game fell to the wayside, getting lost in the crowd. The developer even used custom code on the engine, preventing it from being part of the backward-compatibility program on the Xbox 360.
It was a magical trip into a cartoonish New Orleans and surrounding bayou. Combat made use of Vince’s unique existence as a voodoo doll, and his sarcastic charisma poked fun at game design and the world around him.
Fast forward 13 years, and it’s back, but this time in 1080p and 60 FPS with controller vibration. The game’s creator and founder of Beep Industries, Clayton Kauzlaric, now works as a creative director for Microsoft, the same company that published Voodoo Vince in 2003.
“A couple years ago, I started thinking about updating and re-launching Voodoo Vince myself. My colleagues at Microsoft were really supportive of the idea,” Kauzlaric wrote in a press release.
Kauzlaric has been working with a small team for several months now to restore the old platformer as part of the ID@Xbox program. He promises the game will move and play exactly like it did all those years ago.
Perhaps the person most excited for this is head of Xbox Phil Spencer. He once said Voodoo Vince was his favorite game he’s ever worked on after 26 years with Microsoft.
So great, I'm already playing, special memories. Announcing Voodoo Vince: Remastered, Coming Early 2017 https://t.co/wxrxO06XXG
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) October 5, 2016
The remastered game is expected to be released sometime in early 2017.
