BBG Entertainment

Stephan Berendsen on reviving popular retro titles – including Intellivision classics – for PCs and consoles

- Stephan Berendsen

In 2021, BBG Entertainment released Boulder Dash Deluxe – a game which not only included 20 stages from the original game but 180 new ones. It achieved a score of 80% in issue 219 but now the company is back with not one, not two but three new retro revivals: a reimagination of DynaBlaster alongside fresh renditions of the Intellivision classics Shark! Shark! and Astrosmash. BBG Entertainment president Stephan Berendsen gives us the lowdown.

Hi Stephan. BBG Entertainment is no stranger to revisiting classic games, but what makes them attractive today?

Many of these early games feature great game design. Forty years ago, computers were very limited in terms of graphics and performance, so what mattered was a compelling game idea. These excellent game concepts still inspire today and that’s the reason why we want to keep these games alive and provide new, modern, reimagined versions for current platforms, for players young and old.

You worked on a 30th-anniversary version of Boulder Dash. What do you need to consider when updating old games and what did you learn from the development of that game?

In the development of Boulder Dash Deluxe, we had to find a compromise to appeal to the old Boulder Dash fans and the younger generation that had never experienced the game before. It wasn’t easy but, at Gamescom 2019, we had a Boulder Dash booth in the Retro area. Many young people who had never heard of the game before, played