Electronic Arts' helicopter-based shoot 'em up Desert Strike, along with its many sequels, have gone on to have a noticeable influence on several video game developers since the series first debuted back in the early '90s.
Over the past year, for instance, we've seen the release of titles like Pizza Bear Games' action game Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess, as well as the announcement of MicroProse and Not Knowing Corporation's promising Strike-like Cleared Hot — both of which noticeably take different approaches in picking up the baton from where the iconic action series left off.
It appears, however, that there is one more person who would like to throw their hat into the ring, when it comes to resurrecting the type of gameplay seen in those classic games, with the Jerry Lawson Lifetime Achievement 2019 Winner Tony Barnes recently outlining to Time Extension his plans for his own Strike successor.
Barnes is an individual who will probably be best known to Strike players for lending his likeness to co-pilot Antonio Scott in the second game in the series, 1993's Jungle Strike — a role he would later reprise in the 1994 entry Urban Strike. However, his involvement with the series goes much deeper than that.
He has notably been involved with the series since the very start, working as a production assistant on the original Desert Strike for Sega Mega Drive (though poor crediting meant he was only ever acknowledged in the game's Japanese manual). From there, he was also the co-designer on both Jungle and Urban Strike, working with series co-creator John Manley, and went on to be the lead designer on the N64 version of Nuclear Strike, which released in 1999.
Speaking to Time Extension, Barnes told us that he often gets asked online when he is going to revisit the Strike series, and stated that he does eventually have plans to come back to it in the form of a spiritual successor, which he will develop under his company Retro Ninja. However, before he does that, he has plans for a few different games first, wanting to try something new and challenging before making the decision to revisit his earlier work:
"I've been asked at least once a month for the past 10 years or so — maybe longer — when am I gonna redo Strike? When is there gonna be a new Strike? And it has always been kind of a back burner thing for me.
As I've said to people before, I could probably roll out of bed and sleepwalk through making a new Strike game. But, because of that, I always end up veering towards the non-Strike things.
Recently I equated it to people asking Prince over and over again to do Purple Rain 2. People did for a long time and eventually he made Diamonds and Pearls which is essentially Purple Rain 2 [Editor's note: It's possible Tony misremembered the album, as the 1990 album Graffiti Bridge is more commonly considered to be the follow-up to Purple Rain]. Eventually I'll make my own Diamonds and Pearls, but right now, there are about four games in the queue ahead of it. Luckily, though, they've all been meandering in the background at the same time, so over the next year or so they'll be out."
Two of these games — Run Die Run Again and BPM Boy — have already been announced and both have pages that you can wishlist on Steam, while the other two he is talking about don't seem to unveiled as of yet.
Nevertheless, he decided to share with us a small taste of the direction he would like to take for this spiritual successor, stating:
"I describe my Strike as Neill Blomkamp's Strike. It's going to be a little more grounded and two steps in the future. That's what interests me is doing something that's in the future, and a little less campy with a District 9 kind of vibe. So it'll take place in this dirty, gritty, crunchy analog future."
Does this sound like something you'd be interested in seeing? Let us know in the comments!