Hot on the heels of the likes of Crash Bandicoot and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, it's all aboard the nostalgia train these days as well-loved titles get a fresh coat of paint and an update for modern consoles. Ape Escape could potentially join those illustrious ranks; the official Sony Japan Twitter follows a user who's tweeted out what looks like a tease for a return to the world of Ape Escape.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Ape Escape franchise, which was well-received both in Japan and in the West when it eventually made its way over here. It's impossible to bring up the PS1 era without thinking of Ape Escape, where the name of the game was to wrangle some wild and wacky apes with a net: think the Rabbids, but decidedly more simian in nature.
TechRadar has now reported on an image doing the rounds on Twitter for Ape Escape's 20th anniversary. The image that's garnering so much hype is a shot of one of the franchise's iconic chimps hiding behind a tree. The user responsible for the tweet, piposaru20th, has been followed by Sony Japan's official Twitter account. Some Ape Escape titles were released in Japan under the Piposaru moniker, so it can be clearly inferred that the anonymous user's Twitter handle is a direct reference to the game, along with how the apes themselves are called Pipo Monkeys. TechRadar notes that the translation of the Japanese text approximates to: "Twenty years from that. I've been running around for a long time, but I wonder if there are any guys out there to chase me...?" This teaser appears to hint at a potential remastered return of Ape Escape, from the high-fidelity shot to what looks like a modern reinterpretation of the monkeys' design.
It's probably smart to take this new information about Ape Escape with a grain of salt. At face value, the tweet from piposaru20th appears to just be a celebration of the game's anniversary. The only conclusive point about the potential legitimacy of what's now being taken as a "leak" is that the official Japanese Sony account follows this otherwise anonymous user.
That being said, consumers are already aware that Sony has been instrumental in the re-release of some smash hits like the Spyro trilogy and Crash Bandicoot recently, and those titles have performed extremely well on current-generation consoles. The revitalization of an iconic franchise like Ape Escape is well within the margins of what the company could have planned for the future.
Source: TechRadar