Commodore Says Publishing Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection Wasn't About The Money

Welcome back to Remastered! This week, I interviewed the people behind Commodore's revival. We discuss how that retro computer brand came back and why this new version of Commodore is getting into game publishing with Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection. I also checked out Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition’s The Viking Sagas DLC, an enjoyable DLC thriving in the shadow of Xbox's latest wave of layoffs.

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Why Commodore Came Back With Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection

During the Pixel Arcadia showcase at Gamescom, I was surprised to learn that the revived Commodore was getting into game publishing with a Digital Eclipse-like collection of the Alien Breed games. I knew Commodore was fiddling around with legacy Commodore 64 hardware and even a lo-fi flip phone called the Callback 8020, but getting into game publishing during such a troubling time for the industry was still a surprise.

I’ve played Alien Breed 35th Anniversary ahead of launch and gained a deeper appreciation for these Alien-inspired Amiga games that put Team17 on the map. The full retro series is here, tweaked with more modern-feeling twin-stick controls, online multiplayer, a horde mode that recontextualizes the original games’ mechanics, and a playable interactive museum mode with developer interviews and development materials I love to see in a collection like this.

Alien Breed 35th Anniversary is a strong first game publishing outing for this new version of Commodore, which worked with Anstream to create the collection. To learn more about how Commodore came back and how this collection came together, I spoke to Jim Squires from Commodore and Mike Rouse from Anstream. It turns out that while Alien Breed 35th Anniversary was inevitable before Commodore got involved, it lined up perfectly with the kind of game publisher the resurrected Commodore wants to be: one that prioritizes preservation and community over revenue.

Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. After this trailer, you can read through my interview with Jim Squires and Mike Rouse. It's condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Tomas Franzese: Jim, walk me through bringing Commodore back from your perspective. Why did you join, and what did you want to do with it?

Jim Squires: I joined the company in October, but it came back in July last year…When you ask what brought me into Commodore, one thing is definitely the heartstring pull, the nostalgia factor, the loving of Commodore growing up. But it was also my very first conversation with our CEO Peri [Fractic, who also runs the YouTube channel Retro Recipes].

Peri was a notable YouTuber in the space of folks who enjoy Commodore products, and he thought to himself, ‘What would it take for us to preserve Commodore, to acquire all of the trademarks, to be able to bring it back full force?’ He was able to raise the money and pull it off. I was introduced through a mutual friend, and I realized that his vision was so much more than just the past of computing. 

I'm a huge believer in games preservation. It feels weird to say out loud as Commodore, but I think the work Atari’s Digital Eclipse does is some of the most important in the industry. What the Criterion Collection did for film, and the way it preserved and saved so much film that otherwise would have been lost, the games industry has needed that forever.

Seeing what Digital Eclipse does there is great, and I've thought, “That's fabulous. But why aren't more companies doing that?’ One of the many pillars that we have at Commodore is preserving the past of gaming, and we're doing that through hardware, which is great. But there's no reason we can't be doing that in other ways too.

We already had a great working relationship with Anstream…so knowing full well that we were really keen on game preservation, but also knowing full well that we weren't going to do it just for the sake of doing it, we wanted to make sure that we were looking at the right titles, having the right development team in place. This is very much a case of doing things right rather than doing things quickly. 

Jim Squires (cont'd): While we've been back for more than a year now, we did not want to dip our toe into publishing right away. We thought, ‘Let's wait until we get our bearings,’ which I think we've done now. We're doing quite well in our in our first year back.

The team at Antstream had already been having conversations with Team17 about possibly doing an Alien Breed collection, and when they let us know, we thought, ‘My God, especially in the UK but globally in a lot of ways, Alien Breed was such an instrumental, monumental franchise for the Commodore Amiga back in the day.’ 

After Alien Breed, [Team 17’s] next big franchise was Worms. This was the big franchise they had before their big franchise, so it's a fascinating piece of retro gaming history, something that not enough people of Gen Z, who from my experience so far are really into the retro revival, haven't had an opportunity to necessarily hear about Alien Breed because I don't think it has the same day-to-day name cachet as something like Worms. 

We wanted to make sure that if this was coming out with the Commodore name on it, that we're talking about picture-perfect ports. Preservation where you'd want to hang them in a museum. We want them to feel so tight, so good, and as soon as [Anstream] got an early build in our hands, I was beyond blown away. I could not stop playing it. 

Mike, I’ll toss you a similar question. Can you talk about when you came on board the project on Anstream’s end and what getting started on this was like from your perspective? 

Mike Rouse: Antstream is known predominantly for streaming, but we decided in early 2025 that we wanted to talk to players that preferred to own these games and aren't necessarily streamers. They want to be able to play offline, and they want high-quality versions of the games they used to love. We set up a new division, and it's a super small team of six people, and we decided to focus on preservation of these games through quality. 

We did look at Digital Eclipse as the high bar for what preservation is for these games, and we approached a number of different IP owners. We spoke to Team17, and Team17 has been fantastic. Alien Breed hasn't had a release in the franchise since 2012, so a good long while back, and the original games haven't had official releases on most platforms since originally being launched.

All of my colleagues love collecting physical, they love playing classic games, so we knew exactly who the target audience was for this. We work extremely close with Team17 on getting things like archival footage, as well as doing all the work around bringing in modern features. If you're going to preserve something, you have to make it relevant. 

You'll notice if you ever go to a museum about dinosaurs, they just won't have a load of dry bones on there with some words there. They'll target it so it's fun for kids and it's informational for adults. That's really what you have to do with these game packs, and what makes them very successful.  You can play Alien Breed exactly as you did, or you can play with the modern stuff in there. It just makes it more relatable, and it allows people to enter and enjoy these games without being put off by the limitations of technology back in the 80s and 90s. 

Working close with Team17 was amazing, and then we were looking for a publisher. To be honest, Commodore was on our radar. Commodore wasn't publishing games at this point, but we thought it would be amazing if we could get Commodore to publish Team17's first-ever game that was a hit. The full circle of that story would just be unbelievable for us as gamers that remember it, and so we approached them. To the guys on our side's credit, and to the team at Commodore, they worked really fast once they'd had a chance to review the product and were in full support of what we were doing. 

What was the process for getting these ROMs up and running in this collection? Were there any particular games that presented the biggest technical or development challenges? 

Mike Rouse: The technical challenges we came across are ones that we gave ourselves. We're extremely fortunate to have a guy named Steve Snake. He's written the majority of the great emulators that you play. He understands Assembly like the back of his hand, and for us as a team, just emulating the games was relatively easy. We could get performance, and we built a custom emulator that gave us near-perfect performance. The big challenges came when we wanted to make some changes. 

For example, Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed: Killing Grounds, for a modern audience, were almost unplayable at the frame rate that they originally ran at. [Steve Snake] went into the actual source code and optimized it so that it would run quickly. He didn't do anything with the with the emulator. He didn't allocate more memory or anything. He literally went into the source and went, "If I optimize this here and optimize this there, the game will just run faster.

We then also asked Steve to make the games online, which to be honest we thought was impossible to do. There are a lot of problems when you try to do something like this, but he came back in three days and had written the online solution to bring Alien Breed 2D games online.

He also managed to get the Alien Breed 3D games online, but there's no two-player there. What you ended up with is one player could have controls for going forwards, backwards, and reloading, and the other player had controls for left, right, and fire. We were debating maybe that could be a weird game mode, but in the end we kept it to the 2D games.

We also opted for peer-to-peer rather than dedicated servers. Peer-to-peer isn't as good as dedicated servers, but it is preservable, which is very important. In 100 years, this game can still be played online because of how we built it. The preservation part was always front and center in what we wanted to do.

Was AI used at all in the process, or was it done by humans?

Mike Rouse: Team17 are a no-AI policy company, and the personal views of the dev team are to not use AI as well, so there’s no AI on this product at all.

Jim, what were the challenges you had to deal with when deciding to publish your first game?

Jim Squires: Our biggest concern was perspective about us having our first published game be on modern consoles, and not a newly published title for the Commodore 64 Ultimate. We were a bit worried about the perspective among our own community. We keep a close eye on them, we support where we can, and who knows what might change in the future. Our biggest other hurdle, which is such a silly little hurdle to have, is just like the little things, like needing to knock on all the doors of all the platform holders and say, ‘Hey, we’re back.’

It has been a lot of fun discovering what being a publisher at a company of our size means in 2026. It is such a wild industry to be in, too. One of the biggest things we had to think about before we committed to this was why we were doing it. I think the game is going to do very well. I think it's excellent and polished. I'm not trying to say I expected to be a failure. That's a terrible thing [but] it wasn't about necessarily revenue. I think that so much of the games industry is focused on revenue and needs to be focused on revenue. I completely understand that, it's a hard time out there. It has been a hard time for years, and each year it seems to get a little bit harder. 

With that in mind, our priority was being able to preserve Alien Breed and bring that back. If we can do that, that is a box check because, at the end of the day, our main revenue is coming from hardware and other places. So we can take some gambles, we can make some investments to try to do the things that are overall good for the community. As long as we are making sure that whatever product was coming out the door with our name on it is something we would stand behind…and wasn’t just about driving revenue.

It was a big mind shift that we had to make before we committed to doing this. That being said, I think it’s going to absolutely do well, and I am very hopeful that we will start looking at other opportunities down the road to do similar things. 

I know you can’t speak to future products, but I am curious if, as a game publisher, you see Commodore sticking with collections or if you’re interested in standalone game titles?

Jim Squires: I would love for us to be doing whatever truly makes the most sense for us. That's sort of it. I don't think we're limited to it. I don't think we just want to do collections of old games. The [Commodore] community is out there making some of the best games in the world right now, and they're not getting the audience they necessarily deserve. 

I think if there are things that we can do as a publisher, or even just as a platform holder, to be supportive and help the folks get a bigger audience, I would love to find ways to do that. I do think there are classic games that should be preserved, and we should find ways to bring those back, just like we're doing for Alien Breed. I have a short list in my head that I will not tell you, but I definitely have some dream things I would love for us to do. 

With the Commodore 64 Ultimate, we announced the Made for U program where we are going to start rolling out some developer support, so if folks want to make titles that only work on the Ultimate, they can take advantage of what the hardware is capable of. Whether or not we end up publishing some of those games is to be seen, but at the very least we want to make sure they can do that. 

As part of our collaboration with Cyberpunk, we have a demo that is shipping with them. When I say demo, we’re talking demo scene demo, like the old-school term, not a short version of an eventually playable game. We have an original demo for that set in the world of Cyberpunk. It’s set in Night City, it is a fantastic capture of the entire vibe of the place, and it has some gorgeous visuals that you’ll be shocked at what can be pulled off on a C64. It ships exclusively with the Commodore 77.

We're all keen to celebrate what made games great back in the day, and I think that's really attractive to players nowadays in a way it hasn't been for a long, long time. I'm not looking to point fingers at AAA, but I think that the interest you see in AAA games has really dropped considerably.

I saw some stat the other day that said most Gen Z gamers are buying less than one new AAA game a year on average [Note: I could not verify that specific stat, but data has shown that 18-to-24-year-olds are spending less on games]. They've got their game, they play it, and then if they're spending time on other stuff, they're checking out indie stuff or retro stuff because it challenges them in a different way. It’s nice that we can provide an alternative. The more ways we can do that, the happier I'm going to be.

What's Old Is News

Another round of Xbox layoffs and more

• More layoffs and major restructuring took place at Xbox earlier this week, impacting some very notable legacy studios that Microsoft owns:
  • Activision is developing the next Halo game and taking over Age of Empires steward World’s Edge and Sea of Thieves and Banjo-Kazooie studio Rare. 
  • Obsidian is being incorporated into Bethesda Game Studios as it continues to work on a new Fallout game.
  • Playground and Turn 10 are merging into one Forza-and-Fable-focused studio, while Microsoft Casual Games is getting merged with King. 
  • Sadly, an Xbox Wire post also revealed that negotiations to sell Ninja Theory to another company have fallen through, and the studio will likely close.
• The first two Lufia titles are getting re-released by Taito and Clear River Games, the latter of which is also bringing back Terranigma next January.
• Hamster Corporation is releasing Arcade Archives Xevious 3D/G and Console Archives Karate Champ this week.
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered is getting a physical release on November 13.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition and Middle-earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition are getting Nintendo Switch 2 remasters from Aspyr on September 30.
  • When announcing this, Aspyr teased,"Fans can look forward to even more classic releases by Aspyr from the beloved franchise in the future!"

Before Tuesday's Xbox news, I was planning to simply come out with a glowing reccomendation for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition - The Viking Sagas in this newsletter. I played some of each new campaign The Viking Sagas offers, and came away delighted to see how fresh and fun new Age of Empires 2 content can be 27 years later. But just ahead of this game's 27th anniversary, Xbox foundationally rocked the franchise's future.

World's Edge was put "under the remit" of Activision as part of the Xbox shake-up on September 22. Developers working on Age of Empires have been laid off, with an impacted Senior Software Engineer on LinkedIn revealing that a project they were working on was canceled. Xbox has not commented publicly on the World's Edge layoffs, although I can confirm Activision plans to support the Age of Empires series in the future, not shelve it.

Still, it's disappointing to see World's Edge developers weren't safe from these layoffs, as they delivered something great with this new DLC. The Viking Saga adds campaigns for three new civilizations: the Danes, the Saxons, and the Varangians. While an RTS like Age of Empires 2 already feels infinitely replayable, I love how The Viking Sagas gave me multiple new reasons to play. I eagerly awaited encountering each new unit and scenario the developers crafted, and I was never disappointed.

I hope to see even more Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition DLC after The Viking Sagas, but I'm not sure what form it will take now. Whether it is the swan song for Age of Empires 2 or simply launching on the worst day for the franchise since Ensemble was shut down, I think those interested should still check out The Viking Sagas to prove to Activision that there's still lots of interest in this series.

Thanks for reading through this week's lengthy Remastered! If you've stuck around long enough to read this and somehow aren't subscribed, I'd highly recommend doing so. You can help independent games media by supporting me on Ko-fi.

I'm in the final stretch of writing my thesis, so I will be taking a week off from Remastered. Expect the newsletter to return on October 8!