Games get remade for all sorts of reasons, but I think you’d struggle to find one with as heartwarming a basis as this. The Battle of Olympus—a side-scrolling platformer originally released on the NES in 1988, is getting a remake early next year created by its original husband-and-wife team.
Admittedly, that statement is slightly misleading. Per Time Extension, programmer Yukio Horimoto and artist Reiko Oshida (now also Horimoto) were not actually married when they made The Battle of Olympus—though they were in a romantic relationship at the time of the game’s development.
“We fell in love and wanted to make our game together, so we talked about the game concept for a long time,” Horimoto explained to VG247 in an interview from several years back. “I like Greek myths and legends, so we decided to base our game on those legends. Given those circumstances, we talked about the game and our mood influenced it.”
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Alongside Greek myth, The Battle of Olympus is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda 2, with Horimoto stating that he directly imitated many of that game’s actions. ” I wanted to make the same kind of game, and so many parts of the game, like the player’s attacking motion, ducking motion, and jumping motion: They were all influenced by The Legend of Zelda.”
As for the remake, the Steam page describes it as a “handcrafted Steam remake”, with Yukio and Reiko Horimoto’s reformed Infinity Co “personally recreated in the code, redrawing the pixel art, and refining the game for modern PC players while preserving the spirit, atmosphere and challenge of the original.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a veteran game developer couple has remade a gaming classic. A few years back, Sierra founders Ken and Roberta Williams returned to game development for a shiny redux of Colossal Cave Adventure (with the abridged name Colossal Cave). Unlike The Battle of Olympus, Colossal Cave wasn’t the Williams’ original design. The OG text adventure was made in the mid ’70s by Will Crowther and Don Woods.
Like the Williams’, Yukio and Reiko Horimoto have been fairly active in game development in recent years, having directed the fashion model sims Model Debut #nicola and its sequel in 2019 and 2021. It seems the pair plan to retire from game development for good after the The Battle of Olympus, however, as the Steam page says the remake will be the duo’s “final major game product”.
The Battle of Olympus will release into Steam early access in January 2027.