After nearly fourteen year since Voodoo Vince first appeared on the original Xbox in September 2003, the game has been launched exclusively on Xbox One and Microsoft Windows 10.
Game creator and Creative Director Clayton Kauzlaric, made the announcement on blog post and also the reasons for remastering and renovating the game.
“I didn’t want to see this creation that represented years of hard work, joy, tears, and laughter end up completely lost to time,” he said was the real reason for remastering Vince Voodoo.
Kauzlaric recalls that building Vince during the exciting early days of Xbox is still one of his favorite memories, as there was a lot of innovation and creativity as Xbox made its debut in the world of console gaming.
Beep Games, which he founded, was newly minted and eager to make its mark as well, and their passion for games, hopes and ambitions for the future was all rolled up in the game.
The inspiration for a game set in the South started during a trip to New Orleans, which was his first trip to that part of the country, where he was stuck by the mix of strange and beautiful things that seemed to be everywhere.
“The West is built around wide-open spaces and a lot of our world has been shaped around automobiles. New Orleans was built for humans,” he said adding that the history, culture and atmosphere of the place stayed with him for a long time.
The idea for the Vince game when he was randomly sketching away in a notepad some years later, and a drawing emerged of a strange little Voodoo doll with one big eye.
Starting in 2001 Vince evolved from a little thumbnail sketch to a fully-fledged character to interact with Kosmo and his goons and connect with players in all those little cinematics and cutaways.
They traveled through bayous, cemeteries and the streets of New Orleans to gather references and images that served as the basis for textures seen in the game.
The team increased to twenty mostly veteran developers and they were received the green light in October 2001 and after inevitable compromises the game was completed in two years.
Kauzlaric said there is a lot of stuff packed into Voodoo Vince based on its size and scope, from puzzles to platform challenges to vehicles and mini-games, and still offers a ton of fun game play.
Kauzlaric said that the march of technology and player demographics weren’t on their side in 2003, and Voodoo Vince was quickly lost in the shuffle and seemed like it would remain in obscurity.
He said that Voodoo Vince did find an audience, who loved the game, but it cannot be call a cult hit, and they also missed the backwards compatibility train on the Xbox 360.
Therefore, it was announced in October last year to revive Voodoo Vince, which was made possible with a small team at ID@Xbox to publish a game independently.
The result was as much a restoration as it is a remastering, as many games dating back a mere decade are not playable today, unlike movies which you can watch from over a hundred years ago.
The trailer and screenshots shows that Voodoo Vince looks like it did back in the day, where the villain Kosmo calls Vince a “mere pile of cloth and thread” near the beginning of the game.
