Back in 2022, we reported on the fact that a homebrew coder by the name of Retro Encoder was porting Data East's legendary 1988 RoboCop arcade game to the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive.
The project went somewhat quiet until very recently, when Retro Encoder released a playable demo of the game that matches the coin-op pretty faithfully when it comes to visuals, but is lacking any kind of interactivity with enemies.
Since that demo was released a few weeks ago, another RoboCop port has appeared – and it's already looking so promising that it appears to have convinced Retro Encoder to give up on his venture and move on to other projects instead.
This second port is being handled by Monster Bath Games, the studio behind Mega Splatterhouse, Deathwish Enforcers and Super Battle Princess Madelyn. Even at this early stage, it's looking very impressive.
This is one of the 3 SEGA GENESIS projects I'm working on for fun.
No timeline. I needed to get the first level out of my system. Splatterhouse and the other secret sauce game will be finished first.
Again this is my very limited spare time. I needed a weekend off after being sick and working all week. Because.. why not work for free on weekends.
Yes - I even did the music. It's not finished. Nothing is. I'm using shadow highlight mode so I can have more colors on the screen which means I'll probably do a completely different HUD than what's in the game... just like...drop it at the bottom or something. Or one bar at the top and one bar at the bottom... we'll see.
While it's a shame that Retro Encoder isn't going to carry on with his port, it does mean we might see one of his other ventures earlier than planned; he's in the process of converting Sunsoft's iconic NES Batman game to the Sega Master System.
The Sega Guys recently played Retro Encoder's port, and you can see it in action below.