Actraiser Renaissance composer hopes it leads to more cult-hit SNES revivals

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Yuzo Koshiro on the original game too

Actraiser Renaissance
(Image credit: Square Enix)

Actraiser Renaissance was just one of a dizzying slate of Nintendo Switch announcements last week, but its composer hopes it will be the start of a SNES renaissance of its own.

The new game, which was announced at the September Nintendo Direct and released on PC, PS4, Switch, Android, and iOS shortly afterward, is a remake and reboot of the 1990 SNES game Actraiser. Composer Yuzo Koshiro created the soundtrack for both the original Actraiser and Renaissance, and he revealed on his personal Twitter account that the latter game has had "great sales," which he hopes may lead to the revival of more games from the same studio.

Actraiser was the debut title for Japanese developer Quintet, which would go on to create more beloved SNES games including Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Robotrek, and Terranigma in the years ahead, all published by Enix before its merger with SquareSoft. Quintet's output continued through the PS2 era, but it seems to have gone defunct since then.

While many of Square Enix's classic SNES games have been remastered and re-released in numerous ways since they originally appeared, the Quintet portfolio has largely receded into obscurity. Terranigma has never even been officially released in North America, though that didn't prevent it from earning a reputation as a cult classic action RPG amongst retro gaming enthusiasts.

We reached out to Koshiro's company Ancient Co. to see if he could tell us more about his hopes for Quintet's games coming back to life. The studio politely declined due to his busy schedule, though it did say it was fine with us covering the Tweets themselves. We're pretty sure that means the ball is in your court to keep these revivals coming, Square Enix.

If nothing else, it would be a great excuse to insert them all directly into our list of the best RPGs.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.