Following a tease that Lollipop Chainsaw would be making some kind of a return, a remake has officially been announced to release worldwide sometime in 2023 by Dragami Games CEO, Yoshimi Yasuda on the Japanese website Automaton – it’s still early days but at this time no official title or platforms have been announced.
The remake will be developed by Dragami Games’ staff which is “a combination of development staff from the original version” and newcomers alike with Yasuda who served as the original game’s executive producer and at the time was the Kadokawa Games CEO will be the remake’s producer this time around. The goal of the project is to make the game with a few more bells and whistles to make it more accessible to current-day players. The original is one of the rare games that are not playable through Xbox’s backwards compatibility program.
“It has been some time since players have not been able to access the game on current consoles. We, the original development staff on Lollipop Chainsaw, think of the game as very precious to us, and did not want to leave it in limbo, where players who want to play it cannot. As such, we purchased the Lollipop Chainsaw intellectual property from Kadokawa Games and decided to develop a remake. We have already contacted Warner Bros. about development and are being supported by them in this endeavour,” Yasuda revealed in the interview.
With the Lollipop Chainsaw remake being in development on newer hardware there will be a couple of notable differences, Yasuda says the game’s art style will feature a “a more realistic approach to graphics.” One of the less welcomed differences for fans of the original will be the game’s soundtrack as the remake is getting a new soundtrack due to licensing issues with a good majority of the original game’s soundtrack.
“The original game had 16 licensed songs used in the soundtrack, but it is unfortunately difficult for us to implement all of them this time. As a result, aside from a few licensed tracks, the soundtrack will consist of new music,” Yasuda noted.
Development of the original Lollipop Chainsaw kicked off in 2009 with Grasshopper Manufacture handling development with the game’s director, Suda51, Yasuda, and Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn collaborating with writing the game’s story. Kadokawa Games published the game in Japan with Warner Bros. handling the worldwide PS3 and Xbox 360 release. The game told the story of high school cheerleader, Juliet Starling (voiced by Tara Strong) of saving her school from a zombie apocalypse with her handling chainsaw, who is joined by the disembodied head of her boyfriend Nick who is attached to her hip and is very much alive.
