Game Director Trying to Regain the Rights to Lost PlayStation Exclusive

The Tomorrow Children was shut down not long after its release in 2016 but, five years later, director Dylan Cuthbert is trying to regain the rights to the lost PlayStation exclusive in the hopes of a re-release.

The Tomorrow Children is a Soviet-inflected multiplayer experience that Cuthbert has compared to the likes of Animal Crossing and Death Stranding – it received a mixed reception upon launch but built up a cult following. Sadly for developer Q-Games, it was shut down entirely just a year after release because of server running costs – and due to its online-only nature, it’s been totally unplayable since.

In an IGN Japan video to celebrate the game’s 5th anniversary, Cuthbert played through a developer build of the game, and responded to requests from fans for the game to be re-released – something he likes the idea of, in theory:

“Unfortunately, right now the IP is Sony’s, really. So I’ll keep trying to get the IP back, and if I do get the IP back, then I’ll definitely think about ways to kind of relaunch it but without a server, I think. Because it was the running costs of the server that brought it down, if it didn’t have that we probably just could have left it running and people could have kept playing it, right?”

Cuthbert also addressed the oddity, and sadness, of having made a whole game that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists outside of developer builds:

“I don’t like having a game I made missing, people can’t play it. […] Especially one as pretty and interesting and rich as The Tomorrow Children – it just feels wrong to not be able to play it, you know? It’s great being able to play it now like this, and come back into the world. The people around the office playing it now, they’re just like, ‘Oh we can play it again?’ It’s great fun, you know? We’re all excited to be able to just get this old build running like this.”

As for the feasibility of getting the rights back from Sony, Cuthbert isn’t sure at this point: “Hopefully, at some point in the future, maybe we can get the IP back and try to work out what to do from there. We don’t know anything yet.”

Cuthbert made his name at Nintendo, helping program the original Star Fox, before eventually founding Q-Games in 2001. Most notable for its PixelJunk series, Q-Games created The Tomorrow Children for Sony in 2016, but it marked the last PlayStation exclusive the company worked on.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.