Once heralded as a serious contender to rival Mario and Sonic, Bubsy the Bobcat has spent decades languishing as a gaming laughingstock, with his first foray into 3D platforming, 1996's Bubsy 3D, universally panned. It's then been a surprise that not only is he getting another 3D outing 30 years later, but that early impressions indicate it's actually good, and certainly the best Bubsy game in the franchise's history.
That credit should go to Bubsy's new owner, Atari, for making the wise decision to entrust the IP to Fabraz, an indie studio with a track record of making good 3D platformers, even though the creators of Demon Tides didn't necessarily take it seriously at first.
"We got bombarded on socials – 'Oh, Fabraz should do it!' – and we were king of joking around and saying, 'Leave us alone, we don't want to work on Bubsy!'," studio founder Fabian Rasforter tells me. "But in the back of our minds, we're like, this could be kind of interesting. And then, literally a day or two afterwards, we got an email from Atari requesting a pitch from us. And so we came up with a pitch that I think was really strong from out of the gate."
A retro design grows old
That pitch involved reimagining Bubsy as a middle-aged has-been – something you don't tend to see with other mascot characters, who seem never to age – as a way to playfully joke about a character who is usually on the receiving end.
"If you shit on a franchise, then why are you working on this franchise, right? We wanted to find what's lovable in it, what's nice in it, and then amplify it," Rasforter explains. "And the way we did that is by recontextualizing him as a character where basically instead of saying, 'Haha look at this bad character from bad games,' it's more like he's a washed up B-list actor in a world where even the characters make fun of him, but he keeps on trying, he keeps on coming back and it's kind of like a lovable underdog story that I think then just kind of resonated with us."
It also meant newfound appreciation for Bubsy 3D, a game that none in the team had played prior to making Bubsy 4D. "We kind of made fun nights out of playing Bubsy 3D, just because it's so technically difficult because of the controls being your enemy, but once you accept that, then it's just kind of like a masocore platformer," Rasforter adds.
Some Bubsy 3D elements even make it to Bubsy 4D, including an optional low-poly skin that the team has also added unique expressions for during cutscenes (you can even opt to play with tank controls if you're a proper masochist), while the first world's floor is made out of cloth and has a quilted square pattern that's a homage to the square patterns from the PS1 game.
Bubsy 4D has a Dark Souls influence?
What arguably elevates Bubsy 4D is its development using the studio's custom Fabraz Framework in Unity, which explains how the team was able to ship both Demon Tides and Bubsy 4D in the same year. Yet while the latter shares the former's anime-inspired cel-shading aesthetic and distinct concept of 'expressive platforming', it's also not just a case of re-skinning or recycling the template of a good game.
"We've now been making 3D platformers for five-ish years, and we've been building up all these tools on top of Unity, and all of that is a modular set for building out these 3D character controllers," lead developer Ben Miller explains. "You have shared things like movement and how physics is done, but then we can change up the verbs for how you operate."
Rasforter adds: "The best comparison point that I can give is FromSoftware. Bloodborne and Dark Souls share similar animations, similar rigs and a lot of framework, but you would never say they're the same game."
Some abilities are then changed up, but also the animations that suit the character. For instance, while Demon Tides and Bubsy 4D both have wall runs, Bubsy's animations are more cat-like, so that he's scrambling on the surfaces with his claws. Incidentally, having a cartoon aesthetic also allows for the movement and humour to be expressed.
"With the cat as a character, [Bubsy's] dynamic enough for how he handles, and there's enough forgiving overcorrection for how he can recover from things that leads to these very scrambling panicked moments as you're trying to recover from a jump that you overshoot and then how to course-correct and reverse around," says Miller. "As someone who has two cats, there's this very familiar kind of panicked 'I've gone too far and I need to correct and I'm not quite capable' kind of feel to it."
Better late than never, Bubsy 4D sounds like a correction for the bobcat who may now be remembered fondly rather than just for the wrong reasons, and comes as retro gaming in general is getting a reboot, whether that's Atari, the relaunch of Acclaim or the recent NEOGEO AES+. Which is why 2026 could well be the year of the Bobcat.
Bubsy 4D is coming to PC, Switch 2, Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One on 22 May, and a playable demo is available on all platforms, including Steam.
