Campaign: Get Attack On Pearl Harbor To PC!
It's important when co-editing a major independent gaming website to remain impartial, and most of all, not use the site for your own personal gain. Fortunately I'm a maverick who won't play by the rules, and I really want to play Attack On Pearl Harbor on PC again. The original game came out in 2007 on PC, and quickly clicked with me. Based on the Second Mega War events between the US and Japanese, it was a heavily arcadey dogfighting game from Legendo, that ignored accuracy and physics and focused on ratta-tatta-tat entertainment. It was bouncy, springy fun. This year a complete remake (new engine, new physics, new controls, new everything) came out on WiiWare, but not on PC. And remembering it, having played some DogFighter and Heroes Over Europe, I decided to look it up again.
And it has vanished. So I decided to find out why, and see what I can do about bringing Attack On Pearl Harbor back. "Convince us to create a new version," says Legendo boss. So we will! It's time for a campaign! Please click on and help me with this.
The game was originally on Steam. But search for it now and all you'll find are two trailers for the game, left behind like a dropped handkerchief when the game scarpered from the service. Click on those results and you get taken back to the front page.
More mysterious, developers Legendo Entertainment AB seem to deny ever having made the game too. Their site only bears evidence of the recent Wii version, a complete remake called Pearl Harbor Trilogy - 1941: Red Sun Rising, the PC original covered up like a war crime.
Fortunately for me I bought a copy of the PC version on Steam when it was released, and so it remains in my games list, the data still stored somewhere on their servers. But hidden from public view.
So what happened? I enter interview mode, because the answer lies with CEO of Legendo, Bjorn Larsson.
Larsson: Attack on Pearl Harbor was never available on Steam directly via Legendo Entertainment but instead through Simbin (GTR guys, Swedish too) who acted as an intermediate distributor there (only for Steam). Once the distribution agreement expired, the game was taken off the service for various legal and business reasons.
Which explains that. Larsson also tells me the motivation behind creating the game:
Larsson: It was created with the ambition to make flight games (on the PC) a lot more accessible, an alternative type of experience that had little or nothing to do with the more complex type of flight games everyone else seemed to be making at the time.
Which is why I liked it. It was a flight sim made for people who are me, rather than people who are Tim Stone. And what about the WiiWare version?
Larsson: The recent WiiWare version is a complete remake of that game (new code, engine, physics, presentation, controls) and also includes updated aircraft to make sure the content/props are more historically accurate. The idea was that just because it's a Wii arcade game doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be historically accurate for a game bearing the Pearl Harbor moniker.
But what about the remake? Can we expect to see that on PC? Larrson says he would "love to see a PC remake of the WiiWare game," but is concerned there might not be a large enough audience on our boxes.
Larsson: Personally I love arcade-action games that are easy to get into and don’t require a lot of time, transportation or manuals, but I'm not sure if PC players would agree with that assertion? Any thoughts on that?"
Well? Any thoughts on that? Would you like to see the super-fun, bouncy action of the Wii's Attack On Pearl Harbor making it onto the PC's digi download services? Would you play a game like that, if it was for sale? And how much would you pay? I'm doing a poll! And I should stress, I'm doing this entirely of my own volition, rather than at the request of Legendo. I'm doing it to try to convince them it's worth porting the game, purely so I can play it. I put this idea to Larrson, and he replied suggesting what it could be.
Larsson: Sort of Attack on Pearl Harbor 2.0 on steroids, with multi-player, maybe even some kind of co-op via Steamworks. Convince us to create a new version. That would actually be great, and help me convince Steam, myself, my team, etc.
You may want to take a quick look at the trailer for the Wii version below, because it looks a million billion brilliant, and then answer these questions:
[poll id="2"]
[poll id="3"]