The cult TV anime Samurai Pizza Cats is getting a videogame, 35 years after it first aired. It all looks thoroughly charming.
Fans of katana-wielding mechanical felines, rejoice: the 1990 anime TV series Samurai Pizza Cats is getting a videogame adaptation. In news we’re filing in a draw labelled ‘surprising’, Dutch developer Blast Zero has announced that it’s making a 2D action RPG based on the cult Japanese show.
A considerable amount of care is going into the game if the debut trailer (see below) is anything to go by. The side-scrolling hack-and-slash action has a hand-painted look that echoes the cel animation of its source, and there’s even a hint of staticky grain overlaid to add to the Saturday morning TV feel. Its gameplay – a mixture of action and light RPG elements – also looks pleasantly retro, vaguely recalling Konami’s Goemon (or Mystical Ninja) titles.
Like the series, Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast From The Past is set in Little Tokyo, a kind of feudal-futurist Japan populated by talking robot animals. Its heroes are those titular samurai cats, Speedy Cerviche, Polly Esther and Guido Anchovy, who live in a pizza parlour and fight the nefarious villain Big Cheese (a scheming mechanical fox).
The game’s affection for the original series extends to its writing and vocal cast, with the actors who played the central characters returning for the game. The English cast includes Rick Jones, Sonja Ball, Terrence Scammell and Dean Hagopian, while the Japanese language version will be voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi, Ai Orikasa and Ikuya Sawaki, among others.
Running for just over 50 episodes, Samurai Pizza Cats was originally called Kyatto Ninden Teyandee in Japan, and its tone was somewhat different from the anarchic, self-aware comedy we got in the west. Legend has it that, when Saban Entertainment picked up the US rights for the show from Tatsunoko, the scripts were so poorly translated that they could barely be used, so its western writers simply came up with their own absurdist dialogue.
Blast From The Past isn’t the first Samurai Pizza Cats videogame, either. Ninja Gaiden developer Tecmo made a side-scrolling action platformer for the NES (or Famicom as it’s known in its own country) and released under the show’s Japanese title. It never emerged overseas, though fanmade translation patches have since appeared online.
Read more: Remembering Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden, and its pioneering wall jump
Given just how steeped in Japanese history the TV show, it’s remarkable, in retrospect, that it ever aired in the US or Europe. That it’s getting a belated videogame tie-in is a further welcome turn of events. Equally surprising is its quality level; its design and animation looks as though it’s on a similar level to Cuphead or the output of Shantae developer WayForward Technologies.
Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast From The Past is currently in development for PC (it even has a Steam page), with a release date and other target platforms yet to be announced.
We’ll bring you more details as we get them.
