Goty Is Decided Mr Driller Is Coming Back

Ah, yes. Here’s another franchise that was in dire need of a resurgence: Mr. Driller is back in town.

In recent years, gamers have been coveting the return of old favorites just as much as they’ve been hankering for new titles. This isn’t a problem for certain developers and publishers, of course. There’s nothing more welcome than an opportunity to keep dining out on a popular title from yesteryear, right?

Lately, we’ve seen the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon having great success with remasters of their original PlayStation trilogies. We’ve also seen cult favorites like MediEvil make beautiful and haunting returns in full HD glory (never has skeletal knight Sir Daniel Fortesque’s festering eye socket looked so good). Nostalgic gamers just can’t get enough of remasters, re-released and HD collections, it seems.

It’s enough to make you wonder which old classics are going to crawl out of the woodwork, isn’t it? Well, as it turns out, one’s about to drill its way out of the woodwork, because the adorable and frantic puzzle franchise Mr. Driller is making a comeback.

For the uninitiated, the Mr. Driller series was created in 1999. This Namco/Bandai Namco property is an offshoot of the Dig Dug games (the protagonist, Susumu Hori, is the son of Dig Dug’s Taizo Hori), and flips the familiar frantically-matching-colors gameplay of many puzzle titles into something even more stressful.

Here’s the exciting news, then: Mr Driller: Drill Land has been trademarked in Europe. As Gematsu reports, this is the title of a 2002 GameCube instalment which also never received a Western release. That’s all the information we have so far, but as Drill Land was praised for the amount of content it offered on its original release, perhaps a bumper remaster would be the perfect introduction for new fans of this quirky series.

With the recent news that Ape Escape is also making a return in some form or another, it’s an exciting time to be a fan of oddball, cartoony franchises.

NEXT: Spank The Monkey: Ape Escape News Is Coming In 2020