Factor 5 on its abandoned Turrican spiritual successor Tornado pitched as a Nintendo-published game, future of the series
Factor 5 was responsible for some notable Star Wars games on the N64 and GameCube many years ago. The studio is also well-known for the Turrican series, which is now returning on Switch.
Factor 5 studio founder Julian Eggebrecht spoke about the past, present, and future of Turrican in an interview with Eurogamer. One interesting subject discussed was Tornado, a spiritual successor planned as a 3D title and was initially pitched as a Nintendo-published project. Sadly, it was put on hold and never touched again so that Star Wars: Rogue Squadron could be ready for the GameCube’s launch.
Eggebrecht said:
“It was a spiritual successor to Turrican called Tornado, which was basically attempting the whole Turrican-style free roaming levels in 3D. We got to the prototype stage, but then at the end of the day Nintendo basically said, we don’t think with your team size you can handle that – we were pitching that as a first party game. And they said, we really, really need Rogue Leader for launch – the only game that they knew at the time which would potentially make it for launch was Luigi’s Mansion. So we said let’s put Tornado on ice, and it never really came back off it. That demo is unfortunately, as far as I know, completely lost, because that would have only worked on a prototype GameCube and certainly early prototypes of Flipper and Dolphin.”
Turrican Flashback – a collection of the series past titles – comes out next week on Switch. Although a 3D Turrican is probably off the table, Eggebrecht said Factor 5 is very much interested in making a new 2D entry.
Eggebrecht stated:
“… Realistically, the one thing which we’d love to do is a 2D Turrican, if this is really successful – a modern 2D version of Turrican. I don’t think I would want to go back into 3D as that’s quite frankly not something which really excites me anymore.
But a really nicely done 2D one, which would include the ability for people to do their own levels, similar to Mario Maker. I think the typical pitfall that you have, you have a different memory as the original makeup as the fans who experienced it, and they might want, especially with the Turrican games, it’s tricky, right? The first two Amiga Turricans, the original ones, feel vastly different than, say, Super Turrican 2, which was clearly an homage to the Japanese design style.
How do you cater to that? That’s always the problem. So I’d love to do something where everybody on the team does our version of what we want do with it – and in all likelihood it will probably feel like one of the old games – but then we also put in all of the tools for the fans. That would really excite me – and then I play a level that I’ve never seen, or somebody does a weird tweak or a mod which just basically does something completely new with the whole thing – that just blows my mind.”
