It’s been twenty years since players first stepped into the shoes of Spike, and later Jimmy, to capture all the apes that escaped. Now, Sony is ready to celebrate the twenty year anniversary of the Ape Escape series. Yesterday, a new Twitter account called piposaru20th tweeted out a picture of an ape hiding in the forest with the translated quote, “It’s been 20 years. I’ve always been running away, but is there no one left to chase me anymore…?”
Since then, the account has tweeted out a few different pieces of artwork related to the franchise as well as a commemorative video that highlighted all fourteen entries in the franchise and celebrated the twenty years since the franchise debuted. The Twitter account would also tweet out that from Friday, July 19, through Thursday August 1, a special pop up store will open up in Japan at Tokyo Station that will sell “20th anniversary special goods.”
The Ape Escape franchise has been dormant since late 2010. The franchise has an astounding fourteen total entries, half of which never received a full worldwide release,in the eleven years it was active. The last entry in the series was the PlayStation 3 spinoff PlayStation Move game, PlayStation Move Ape Escape, which released in December of 2010. However, the last mainline entry in the series was released all the way back in 2005 with Ape Escape 3.
With Sony now celebrating the franchise’s twentieth anniversary, it may be possible that the company finally has new plans for the franchise. This could possibly lead to a remake of the 1999 original game, a la MediEvil, or possibly even remake of all three mainline entries in the series similar to the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro trilogies. It could even lead to the long rumored Ape Escape 4 finally being released.