It’s been a long old while since the last “proper” Ape Escape game graced a PlayStation console (well over a decade, in fact), but a fishy looking tweet shared recently suggests that more monkey business could well be on the way soon.
Eurogamer first flagged a Twitter account with the handle @piposaru20th, which sent out a tweet asking if there’s anyone out there still chasing those cheeky apes. The account only appears to have been created in the last few weeks, which usually wouldn’t make it especially newsworthy.
What does make it interesting is that Sony Japan Studio’s very own (verified) Twitter account has added @piposaru20th to its own prestrogious list of follows. When you consider Sony Japan Studio previously worked on Ape Escape titles, we’re presented with the very real possibility that an announcement of some kind is coming.
Oh, and there’s the little fact that Ape Escape celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and the Ape Escape website recently updated for the first time in years, and Sony has shown they’re willing to revisit classic franchises with remasters of MediEvil, Wipeout, and PaRappa The Rapper.
In my humble opinion, all of this means a remaster, remake, or maybe even a brand new Ape Escape game, could almost certainly be one of the last titles we see grace the PlayStation 4 before it bows out to make room for the next generation of hardware.
Ape Escape first launched on the original PlayStation way back in 1999, and combined platforming, light puzzle solving, and combat, as players raced to reclaim a number of captured apes. We got two sequels and a handful of spinoffs, but while Ape Escape 4 was announced back in 2006, nothing ever came of it.
The games were beloved for their bright, gorgeous visuals (which still hold up IMO), as well as their inventive and consistently surprising gameplay mechahics. Fun fact: Ape Escape was also the first game to make the original DualShock controller mandatory.
For now, we’ll have to treat these reports of a new game as mere rumblings of course… but all of this is building towards Ape O’Clock, if you ask me. I hope so, anyway. While I haven’t really thought about Ape Escape in years, I’d be one of the first to sign up for more monkey magic.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.