If you grew up a Toy Story fan in the late 90s, there's a pretty good chance you've probably heard of Traveller's Tales' Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue.
Initially released in 1999 for N64, PlayStation, Windows, and Mac (a Dreamcast port would follow one year later), the third-person action platformer arrived just in the nick of time to capitalize on the success of the second movie and received a pretty strong marketing push at the time, being subject to ads in video game magazines, promotional demos, and ridiculous commercials about family reunions gone wrong.
Because of this, it ended up finding its way into a lot of people's PlayStation libraries as a kid and has become a significant source of nostalgia for many of those same people, who are now much older but still have fond memories of helping Buzz on his quest to save Woody. If you happen to count yourself as one of them, then you'll probably be interested to learn that a developer, and a group of collaborators, have been working hard for over a year on a remake of the title, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, and they've been sharing their progress on YouTube during all that time.
Toy Story 2: Reassembled, as the project is called, unfortunately, isn't intended as a game that will ever be made publicly available to play, with the developers instead urging to buy the original on PS4/PS5. Instead, it was originally envisioned as a simple portfolio project that quickly got out of hand after it started getting a lot of attention online and is now mostly being built for educational/entertainment purposes.
It was started back in February 2024 by its lead developer Zachary McPhink, and has since grown to include contributions from various other collaborators like Illia Mallyk (animator), Kyle Metz (lead artist), and Dor Yaakov (artist), to name just a few.
Interestingly, as McPhink states in one of his latest videos, "I spent 1 year remaking Toy Story 2 in Unreal Engine 5", originally, he didn't set out to create a Unreal Engine 5 remake of Toy Story 2 due to being a particularly strong fan of IP or loving the original game all that much. Instead, he picked it from a shortlist of candidates simply because he felt it deserved a remake to be "the best version of itself possible", and wanted to see whether he could fix some of the issues he identified with the original, like the game's mantling system and issues with the depth perception.
Since then, he's managed to pretty much complete the first level of the game, not only managing to fix some of these problems, but adding in some gorgeous new visuals (which aim for a middle point between the original Toy Story 2 and Spyro the Reignited Trilogy), stylish animations, a new cosmetic system, and various tweaks to the level design to better increase the flow from one area to the next.
It's honestly worth watching the recent video to see just how far the project has come, with McPhink going into some exceptional detail about the various trials and tribulations the team has faced on the project over the last year or so.
It also ends with a bit of an update on what the team is going to do next, with the lead questioning whether they should continue working on the second level of the game, Andy's Neighbourhood, or wrap up development and focus on another slightly different remake project.
You can watch the latest trailer here.