Last week, System 3 was under fire regarding the upcoming James Pond Legacy: The Pond Is Not Enough collection. Having released a trailer edited like meemaw’s 94th birthday e-card and rife with AI generated art, the publisher snapped back at critics by claiming that AI wasn’t even involved in development. It was a baffling statement to anyone with eyes to see, including series co-creator Chris Sorrell, who had some choice words about the remake.
“I’m sure it won’t shock you to hear that I was in no way consulted or involved,” Sorrel tells Time Extension‘s Damien McFerran. “For that to have happened there would have to have been someone with at least a scrap of respect for James Pond involved, when clearly, as their every action demonstrates, that’s very far from the case.”
Originally released on the Amiga in 1990, James Pond spawned a handful of sequels and spin-offs, the most popular among them RoboCod, ported to practically every console of the era. Like most loopy Amiga platformers, the game served as a foundation to a far more storied career, as Sorrell would proceed to work on bigger hits like MediEvil and Prototype.
As publishers stumble around the mounting backlash to AI use, the response from System 3 Software was especially surreal. Not defending their use of AI, but outright denying it, when the finished product appears to be more AI generated than not. The publisher released production art in an attempt to sway commenters, but no one was biting this worm. Sorrell found the evidence especially laughable. “Why do they think any developer would waste time making an Illustrator version of an already fully-realised character design?” says Sorrell. “How about showing me a wireframe mesh inside a 3D package?”
In the interview, Sorrell laments that the series that launched his career is being done so dirty, while groups like Digital Eclipse create far more attentive, archival collections under Atari. Instead, to him, the James Pond collection has come to embody the loveless, short-term approach that’s wrecking havoc across the entire industry. Sorrell is not pulling his punches over the belittlement, hoping that those responsible “choke on an AI-generated fishbone.”