21 years ago, Nintendo killed The Great Giana Sisters. Now it's coming to the Nintendo DS.
The classic combination of pipes and owls.Considering how thoroughly imitated its been in the past 23 years, it's easy to forget that, when Super Mario Bros. first came out, it was an incredibly groundbreaking game. There was literally nothing else quite like it, particularly when it came to computer games, where the big games of the time included relatively stiff, dense titles F-15 Strike Eagle, King's Quest II, Ultima III: Exodus, and Wizardry II. Noticing the gap, Time Warp Productions produced The Great Giana Sisters for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, a game that apparently bore an actionable resemblance to Nintendo's own plumber-jumping smash hit. The Great Giana Sisters was pulled from shelves almost immediately, though it still managed to foster a cult following through unofficial remakes and good ol' fashioned piracy.
Apparently enough time has passed, or perhaps there are now enough Super Mario Bros. knockoffs that it no longer makes a difference, as Time Warp Productions is set to publish a remake of The Great Giana Sisters on, ironically enough, the Nintendo DS. I've never played the original, and while I hear it's pretty good, I suspect that there have been enough interesting Mario-style platformers since then that its greatest strength will be its curious status as a historical footnote. The Great Giana Sisters is set for a June 2009 release in Europe, though no US release date has been revealed.
