The Big Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered Interview: Launching Against GTA 6, Cutting Hedorah, and Staying (Mostly) Faithful to a GameCube Classic

· IGN

IGN gave Atari and Pipeworks' Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee an 8.4/10 review when it launched in 2002. At the time, we said, "as far as multiplayer experiences go, Godzilla represents one of GameCube's very best." Now, senior designer Simon Strange and the rest of the team are back and ready to do it all over again.

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Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is something fans have pleaded for but never thought would actually happen. After all, it's been 24 years since the original game came out, and with no sign of the arena brawler series since Godzilla: Unleashed stomped onto the scene in 2007, there's been little hope for a proper return. That changes this November.

With remastered graphics, a playable Showa-era Mechagodzilla, and a few new irradiated bells and whistles, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is set to arrive at a time when kaiju fans are in desperate need of a standalone game featuring the King of the Monsters. IGN spoke with Strange to learn about how things have changed since he first helped bring the original game to players in the 2000s.

From the decision to cut the Smog Monster, Hedorah, to launching so close to GTA 6 and the potential for Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed remasters, we talked about (almost) everything Godzilla fans could ever want to know about Pipeworks' return to the franchise. You can read the conversation in its entirety below while we wait for Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered to launch for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S November 3, 2026.

IGN: It's been almost 24 years since the original Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee came out. Why do a remaster now, and why is 2026 the perfect time for more Godzilla from Pipeworks?

Simon Strange: We've been wanting to do a remake of this game for years. We've talked about it for at least a decade. A big obstacle for a lot of that time was that the original game was made in our own proprietary engine, which is called Spigot. Internally, we still have a lot of the engineers who worked on Spigot, and we said, 'If we wanted to revise these games, does that mean bringing Spigot up, getting back into that, working it with the new versions of DirectX, having to support all the new consoles?' We're very much an engineering company. The engineering behind revitalizing the old engine was the big obstacle, but a different idea that came up two, two and a half years ago is that part of our Spigot engine was we compiled all of our data into a proprietary format.

One of the engineers who had written those compilers was like, 'I could just write a tool that would recompile those into generic formats that are used by other engines.' He did that, so we were suddenly able to bring all of those assets from the original game out of Spigot and put them into other engines, like Unreal, in this case. As soon as we could do that, I just started playing around with stuff, and I was like, 'Oh, look, I got the characters working. Oh, look, I brought the cities in.' Then we were basically off to the races.

Then, it was just a matter of getting in touch with Atari, getting in touch with Toho, and 'Look what we've got!' We started to put all the things together. So, that was really sort of the genesis there, is that, instead of using the old engine and bringing it up to modern standards, bringing the assets out of the old engine into new engines that are already working on modern standards.

A couple of questions from that, then. So, it's called Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, but there are some new elements as well. Why call it a remaster and not a remake? How did you define that line?

Strange: Oh, that was a long discussion. Ultimately, remaster is just a term that people understand. If you say remake, people say, 'What exactly is that?' and then you have to explain it. This is not a strict remaster. The way that I think about the term… I mean, remaster makes sense in music recording, right? We are definitely using many of the original assets. Most importantly, all of the animations for the characters are exactly pulled out of the old game. It's all just the same animations, but for example, all the meshes on the characters, the textures on the buildings, the lighting, the VFX – that stuff is just new.

We just built new things for there, but it's a fighting game, so the character animations, I think, are really the core. I mean, that's the area that I work on most, and so those are exactly the same. The audio is exactly the same. The feel and the controls and the button layouts, exactly the same. When you play through the adventure mode, it's exactly the same sequence of the fights. We do have some elements that are exactly the same. We have some elements that are all new, but are built to evoke the old game, and then we have some elements that are just new.

So, 'remaster?' Just for clarity. Just to not confuse people. That's really where we came with that. I think remake is more correct, but there are elements that are exactly the same. So, 40% is remastered directly from the original source, 60% is new.

I remember seeing that Pipeworks logo flash on the screen when I think back to the 2000s. How much of the original team is back working on this game? How many have stuck around through all those years?

Strange: Not very many.

I mean, this is 25 years ago that I started working on this game. In fact, it was almost exactly 25. I started at Pipeworks in November of 2001, and the team had already started on the Godzilla game. I was brought in specifically to work on the Godzilla game.

I think we have six people who have worked on at least one of the Godzilla games up through Godzilla: Unleashed. That's through 2007. We have, of that original original team, three or maybe four. We definitely have four people still at the studio who worked on that original game, and at least three of them have directly contributed, one of whom being the original engineer who wrote the exporter. There's myself being the game design lead, and then our technical director and one of our senior producers also have been making contributions.

Certainly, we're playing the game, being like, 'Well, didn't we do it this way? Why don't we have the spotlight?' So, that's a lot of fun.

What was it like revisiting your relationship with Toho and the license holders? What has it been like working with them on this game again?

Strange: I really appreciate Toho. They're very exacting. They are not a hands-off kind of team. They're in there, and they get into the minutiae, and I quite appreciate that. You have to really schedule time. You have to do more iterations with them than you would with other license holders, but as long as you have that in mind, it's not a big deal.

My experience from the original series of games was that it was pretty rough for the first game, but then, as we established those relationships, Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed got much, much faster and easier as we built up that level of trust. So, we're restarting some of that, so things are taking a while again, but that's OK. That's good. That's part of the process. We're doing this because we're not making an original game; we're using the Godzilla license, and we want to get the license right. We want to be respectful to the company and to the fans, and that's part of the fun.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the rights for all of these different characters can be tricky. Was there anything that you wanted to do in the original game but couldn't that you are now able to do in this game? The first thing that comes to my mind is Jet Jaguar. There have been stories about how you wanted that character, but there were some issues. Was there anything like that that you could bring in?

Strange: I'll say that I've changed my language around this some. When we make the games, we talk about things. Over the decades, I've said things like, 'Oh, we wanted to do this,' but that's maybe overselling it. It's not like, 'We spent all this time and money, and we were trying something.' We were like, 'Jet Jaguar would be cool. Can we get him? No? Oh, OK.' That's about the level it went to. We definitely had Atari people looking into, 'Can we get Jet Jaguar?' but it's not like we had built Jet Jaguar and had him working in the game. It was just notional. That said, there's stuff that we're definitely…

There are things that we got better at throughout the series. We had some serious discussions about, 'Do we do it the better way that we did later, or do we preserve some of the clunkiness of the original game?' We have decided generally to preserve the clunkiness.

We're trying to make things the way they were. There have been moments when we're like, 'Hey, we could do this better. We could do this in a new way. We could do something that's a little different,' but generally, we have decided to do it the old way as much as possible.

One example I'll give you: Originally, we worked for the GameCube controller. The GameCube controller had one shoulder button; it had the Z button. Then, when we went to the Xbox, the Xbox had two. They had an extra button. So, when we went to Xbox, we added a grab button.

Before, it was punch and kick at the same time as grab, but now we have a new button, a dedicated grab button. Modern consoles, they all have the extra button, so everyone has a grab button. Well, do you still want to support punch plus kick for a grab? It's just a harder way to do it. Why would you do it that way? You have a dedicated button.

Well, we are supporting it. You press punch and kick at the same time, and it grabs because we want it to still feel like the original game. Even though there were very good arguments made internally that we don't need that, and supporting it just encourages people to sometimes do things in a way that you will sometimes screw up, or your fingers won't quite hit it right, we were like, 'No, just teach them to always use the dedicated button.' We are supporting the old way in that case.

It was cool to see so many people excited about the announcement online. Was that something Pipeworks expected?

Strange: I expected it, personally, as just me. I have been active in the Godzilla community for decades now, and I know how excited people are for these things. I think that other people were skeptical. I mean, of course, Pipeworks thought that there'd be a good response, but I think everyone was really surprised. I think Atari was really surprised. I think Toho was really surprised to see just how big it was, but that's great. That's good news for us.

There was also a lot of online chatter about Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered's November release date. How was that release date chosen? Is that date sticking?

Strange: I mean, yes. This is a key thing, really. November 3 is Godzilla's birthday. That's Godzilla day. That's the day that's when Toho releases new Godzilla films in Japan. That's the day that new Godzilla announcements are made. I mean, that's Godzilla Day, and I didn't know that 25 years ago when I first started working at Pipeworks. Now, I'm like, 'Well, obviously, we should come out on Godzilla Day.' I think that's great. People who are big Godzilla fans, they see that it's coming out November 3, and they're like, 'Oh, I see what they're doing.' Because they know that's Godzilla Day. Now we know, so we want to show that off.

So, that leads into my next question: You are still looking at November for Godzilla's birthday because you have to.

Strange: Absolutely. We have to. Yeah.

One of the reasons there has been so much talk online – and I have loved seeing all of the memes and light-hearted jokes around it – is if you look at the video game release calendar for the year, Godzilla is one of the very, very few games coming out in November. I'm not an expert, but my guess is that Grand Theft Auto 6 has something to do with that. I've seen Pipeworks tweet about this a few times too, so my question is: Why isn't Godzilla scared to go up against GTA 6?

Strange: I have also loved all those memes. I think that's great. Honestly, wasn't even in our head at all when we were picking the release date.

That's not my business. I make the video games. I'm not too worried about when they come out. If Atari had come to us and said, 'Wow, we can't because we think it's going to affect the sales with GTA,' we would've had that discussion. But no one ever said anything. It was like, November 3 is obviously the day. Based on when we started, when we got the contract with Atari, we were like, how long does it take to manufacture the physical disc? Yeah, November was always the date.

So, the GTA thing, that's hilarious. It's really cute memes. We've all really enjoyed that. It was never part of our thinking. I wasn't looking at that calendar and being worried in any way or thinking about what other games are coming out because the Godzilla fans are very excited for it. They'd buy it on any day that it came out, and putting it on Godzilla's birthday, that's just respectful.

Was there any temptation to include even more monsters in the roster? Obviously, as the series went on, there were more.

Strange: Sure. There were possibilities of doing all kinds of different things. We talked about a lot of different plans. We had the ability, now, to bring in assets from these old Pipeworks games, so what do we do with that? It wasn't obvious that a remaster of the first game was the thing. We talked through a lot of different plans, but a faithful remaster of the first game is the plan that we settled on. So, that's the way we're going, but certainly before we settled on that plan, we talked about doing different things. We talked about doing different sets of things, or what can we do now that we have this technology? Do we make a new game? I mean, all kinds of things were on the table, but the plan we settled on was a faithful remaster of the original game, so that means using the original cast.

The number one thing I see people asking for is, now that Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee is coming back, they obviously want the other games. Is that a desire that the team has seen, and is it something you would be interested in bringing to life at some point?

Strange: Let me tell you, I had that desire long before we announced this game, so I get it. I want to do all that stuff, too. I mean, all that stuff is now technically possible. We can bring all those assets from all those Spigot games, and we can bring them into Unreal, and we can do all kinds of things with that. The unfortunate, bland answer is that it depends on what kind of a contract we put together. Pipeworks as a company is really big now. When we were doing these games back 25 years ago, we were literally 12 people in one room. Now, Pipeworks is like 300 people. I mean, it is huge. We are working on dozens of different projects. We have all kinds of different stuff pulling at our time and attention, and there are all kinds of different possibilities for what we're doing at any given time.

Atari has their own ideas and their own plans. Me, as an individual person, I love the idea of bringing all that content back to the players. I think that's great. I would especially love – and I'm speaking a little out of turn here – but I would love to avenge the sort of mediocre release of Godzilla: Unleashed.

There was a lot of trouble on that, and I had a conversation where we were like, 'Would we remaster every possible game?' I was like, 'Nobody wants a straightforward remaster of Godzilla: Unleashed because that game was busted in some ways.' So, if we wanted to revisit that content, I'd want to do it better. There is not already a contract for that, but whatever. Contracts… We've got a whole biz dev section, Atari's got a whole biz dev section, they're talking based on the response… I mean, a lot of stuff is on the table. There's a lot of conversations to be had in the future, and I'm very excited for all of that.

I'm definitely rooting for it. This goes back to my earlier question: Was there any temptation to build on the original game with content from the more modern Godzilla releases? Minus One, Shin Godzilla, or even the Monsterverse series? These, essentially, could even be skins for Godzilla. Is that something you considered, as well?

Strange: The Monsterverse, no. That is a separate entity. Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus Zero, that stuff is Toho, though. So, that is something that has been sort of discussed in the ether. That is something that's a little interesting. There's also been a lot of discussions about what is a skin? What's a new character? How much do you need to differentiate things?

There was a lot of discussion since the game's release about which characters are too similar to other characters. I know a lot of that is good-hearted, but man, some of that stabs at me because this is my area. I'm building the combat, the movement, the controls; I'm differentiating the characters. When I made the first game, we had Godzilla '90s and Godzilla 2000, and in my mind, that was Ryu and Ken. I was like, 'Oh, yeah, so they're basically the same because they're rivals.' Then people said, 'Oh, they're just clones of each other and so lazy.' I was like, 'It's Ryu and Ken!'

Where people would be like, 'Ghidorah and Mecha-King Ghidorah, they're just clones.' I would say, 'They're so different. They're so different. They have totally different weaknesses. Yes, they're sharing many animations, but…' Anyway, that sort of stuff really bugged me. You can see in the later games, I worked really hard to make it super clear that all the monsters are really different. They've got really different play styles and strategies. That was the part for me in this remaster that has been the hardest. It's all the stuff I'm like, 'This is the part where it's the same, but people want them to be different, but I can't because it's got to be the same. It has to be the same game. I can't make it more different.'

Godzilla 2000 runs faster than Godzilla '90s, but it's like 9% faster. It's a small difference. I was like, 'Maybe I'll make that bigger.' Nope, it's got to be the same. Every time I want to make it even more different or expand on things, I was like, 'It's got to be the same,' but let's talk about the one big exception because I assume you're going to. Do you want to ask the question about the one big exception about being the same?

I do know about bringing in the alternate Mechagodzilla design, so enlighten me!

Yes, that was the big change. Instead of using the '93 Mechagodzilla mesh, we're using a 1975 Mechagodzilla mesh, and that was not an initial plan. When we first sat down and we started, we were like, 'It's going to be a faithful remaster. That's the plan.' I was like, 'OK, faithful – but what do we want to change?' I came up with a short list of things that we are changing, even though it's a faithful remaster.

Then, we got into development, and we're going through, and we're working stuff, and it just came up, and as soon as it came up, it was so obvious. We were building all the new character meshes, and we were getting to the point where we were going to build the Mechagodzilla mesh, and it was said out loud: 'Obviously we should change.'

In the original game, we didn't know we were making more than one game. We thought this was it. We didn't think there was going to be a bunch of others and remakes. So, we're like, 'Mechagodzilla's got to be a character.' We're making this game, and the '93 Mechagodzilla – which, that movie didn't come out in the U.S. until '94 – that's like five years old. That was the most recent Mechagodzilla. We were like, 'We'll use that. That's Mechagodzilla.' That's the one we had toys for that was easy to get. In fact… [Editor's Note: Strange then held up a small Mechagodzilla figurine.] This is the actual toy that Pipeworks bought that we modeled our Mechagodzilla off of. These are all the original toys, and I love it when people say things like, 'The characters, they look like they're modeled off these toys.' Yeah, they absolutely are. We bought a set of these toys, and that's how we did it.

So, that's Mechagodzilla, but then we were like, 'What does a Mechagodzilla do?' Well, we weren't exactly matching the '93 film. We were just pulling all the Mechagodzilla stuff together to make our sort of a gestalt Mechagodzilla. The same way with Ghidorah; it wasn't Ghidorah from 'this film.' We were just pulling in lots of different Ghidorah elements. Kiryu didn't even exist. When we were making the game, that movie hadn't even been shot. Then, for the Japanese version, they're like, 'Oh, we want to add this new Mechagodzilla.' Kiryu wasn't even the fan name. It was the New Mechagodzilla. We called it Mechagodzilla 2000 or Mecha 2K.

So, inside the game files, there's Mechagodzilla and Mecha 2K, but then, we said, 'Well, this is confusing because what do we call him? We can't call him that.' We then called it Mechagodzilla 2 for the '93 version, and then Mechagodzilla 3 for Kiryu. But then, I hadn't thought about this: In the Showa era, '74 is Mechagodzilla, and then '75 is the same Mechagodzilla, but on his armband, it says MG and then MG2. Well, that implies that the '75 is Mechagodzilla 2. So, then what? So, '93 is now Mechagodzilla 3, but he's in a different continuity. The naming is so bad. I hate it so much. What do you call it? Is it Mechagodzilla 2K is 3, but now it's 4?

And all the file names are all just all over the place. What we say in-game, and what we've recorded for the announcer voice, is just different in different games. I was like, 'Oh, my God. Let's tamp it down.' Mechagodzilla is the '74/'75 character. Super Mechagodzilla is the '93 character. Kiryu is the 2002 character. Three different names. Given that was the naming and given that the announcer says Mechagodzilla, we were like, 'We're using the '74/'75. That's what we're doing.' We had to then go to Atari. In fact, we did this without getting Atari's approval. We did it, and we were like, 'Look what we did, Atari, please say it's OK!' Atari said, 'This is cool, but we have to go to Toho now and talk to them and get permission,' and thankfully they did.

Toho said, 'Yes, well, as long as there's an accurate Mechagodzilla, that's all good. It's all kosher.' It would've been no big deal if we had called that out before the project started, like, 'Here, it's on the list of changes,' but it was midstream. As we got to the point where we had to make the character match, we were like, 'We should fix this to fix the naming and fix...' So, that was a big deal. I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased we got that done.

I, alone in my office, cheered. I was so happy to see that revealed. That's the main thing I saw everybody talking about online after the trailer came out.

So, we did this internally. I showed it off to one of the artists who's a big Godzilla fan, and he fell off his chair. We were just on a Zoom call. It's late at night. He just fell out. I said, 'This is going to be so good.' Still, though, it's the same game. It plays exactly the same. He's got the rocket fingers; he's got the jet thrusters. It's all exactly the same. It's the cross-attack beam instead of the plasma cannon, but it functions just the same, the same hit boxes. It has different VFXs; the same laser eyes, but the laser eyes are now rainbow. But mechanically, it's all exactly the same. We didn't change anything; we just changed the mesh. The collision spheres are all exactly the same. The animations are the same, et cetera.

Is Mechagodzilla 2 not in the game, then? Completely replaced?

Strange: Yes, we have a single character. The character's name is Mechagodzilla, which is the original character name we used in the first game, but the visual appearance of that is the 1975 Mechagodzilla.

Is there anything you're particularly excited for fans of the original game to see in this remaster?

Strange: Yeah. Gosh, there are things I'm very excited about. There are some things that we were trying to do an announcement of or show off. Yeah. OK. Bear with me.

We have a director mode. You can pause the game and fly the camera around, pause time, zoom in, and use that to do screenshot sort of stuff, turn off the HUD... I think that's going to be awesome. I think we'll see a lot of people making videos and taking screenshots and capturing content in that way. I think that's going to be really cool. I think people are going to like that a lot. We had that as a debug option in the original game, but it wasn't something we shipped out to the consumers. This time, we put a little time into it and made a little UI, so we let people have that. I think that's going to be great.

Let's see… We also have the new unlock system. It's been talked about a little bit, but that's my baby. I really like it a lot. I think it's a lot more interesting, a lot more engaging. The original unlock system was kind of a grind and a little dull, and we didn't tell you how to unlock anything. It's like you only have three characters of 12. You're like, 'Well, what do I do?' It was like, 'I don't know. Figure it out.' Now, there's a whole research system, there’s rumors, you're sort of playing as the G-Force labs. It's like, 'Rumors of a sighting of a monster over here. Maybe we should go investigate that.'

We use that to say, 'Play a different game mode. Play some Melee games, play an Adventure game, play some Survival games.' All these different things lead you to different unlocked paths, and then as you play the game, you earn research points that you then use to unlock the monsters.

I played through recently, and I unlocked Orga first. I want Orga first; Orga is the first one I went after, and I did it. This is nitpicky: The press release says 'unlock things in any order.' That's not 100% true. Some things have to happen after other things, and there are some natural things. Like, Orga takes a lot more research than Godzilla 2000. Most people, I think, will get Godzilla 2000 before they get Orga, but you don't have to. You can do it in another order, but it's not literally any order.

Two of the characters, they have prerequisites of having another character unlocked first, but it's really flexible. I think it's a lot of fun. I love just restarting and getting a clean save and unlocking and trying to figure out how it can be more efficient. It's like, 'Oh, now I have to play four games in San Francisco.' Yeah, I think that's a lot of fun. I nerd out on that stuff a lot, but again, it's my system.

On the flip side of that, hopefully, a lot of new people will pick up this game, as well. People who have never played it, who are fans of Godzilla, or maybe even people who've just seen the recent movies. What's your pitch to newcomers on why they should play this game? Why this is a great Godzilla experience?

Strange: I mean, I think the game is really fun. We have some playtester videos that came back recently, and there were these people who were trying to be really harsh about the game and really nitpicky, or whatever. But I had video, and they were just laughing and just cackling as they would play, and it was so much fun. Sometimes, people get down the nuance, and it's like, well actually, the game is quite complicated. There's actually a lot of nuance on different block heights, and there are five different attack directions, and there are 12 different damage types. There's all this nuance. It's like, yeah, but also, boom, boom, boom, I shot you with my high-energy breath, and it's awesome.

I really enjoy fighting games. I play a lot of fighting games, but I think that fighting games are often built in kind of a mean-spirited way. In most fighting games, if I hit you, you can't do anything. If I keep hitting you and keep hitting you, you just can't do anything. In some ways, in the way that people often approach fighting games, if I play really well, you literally don't get to play the game. I'm hitting you all the time because I'm really good, and you're like, [noises of frustration]. You never get to play the game. I think that's really unfun, so all of these games have always been built to not be that way. I don't know. If I'm really good, I'm going to hit you, bam, but then you get knocked away, and you stand up, and you can just come right back and hit me back.

A rank beginner playing these games should be able to take away half of my health before I win. Even if you aren't very good at the game and don't understand the systems, you should be throwing down lots of damage, getting lots of hits in. You should be playing the game a lot. I think that's something that makes it really fun, is that everyone's always engaging. You get to be a big monster, you get to smash the city, you get to send your opponents flying, you get to charge up your high-energy breath. All that stuff is exciting and fun, and I think people like those one-on-one combat fighting games, but especially when they actually get to play it. We made a game here where everyone really gets to play the game all the time, and especially you get into four-player and everyone gets to play the whole time. I think that's really fun and very special.

What does the power of modern consoles allow you to do for this game? Are there any console-specific features? Obviously, the PlayStation has a touch pad, for example. I don't know if that's something you utilized or anything like that.

Strange: We did not use the touch pad, specifically. We thought about it. I'm really into controllers and different control things. One thing we did use that we worked hard to make sure worked really well is that, on the Switch, we made sure that you could play the game with a single Joy-Con because local, in-person multiplayer is, I really think, where this game shines. I think about being a kid, and if I had a Switch, I don't necessarily have other controllers – but the Switch has got two. So, here, I take it out, and I can play with my sister. I want to be able to have a controller, and we can just sit there and play. It's better if you have the full controller or the Pro Controller, whatever. It's better, but it's very playable with a single Joy-Con.

That's important because man, I want kids to be able to say, 'You and I each have a Switch. We can play four-player because we have two Switch consoles; that's four controllers. Four people can now play the game.' I thought that was really important. Part of the reason that this game was originally a GameCube game and not an Xbox game is because the GameCube had four ports. It had four controller ports, and Atari was always like, 'This is a four-player game. It's a party game. It's a Melee game. That's so important.' Being able to have four people locally and play is really important, so supporting the single Joy-Con, I think, hopefully, will really drive Switch 2 owners to play in local mode. I think that's going to be big.

We obviously talked a lot about maintaining the roster and keeping the roster the same, but there is one character that I have heard rumors about. I'm not sure I've seen official confirmation about it, but there was talk about a PlayStation 2 port that may have had Baragon included.

Strange: Yes.

Did you want to bring Baragon into the Remaster? Is that something you considered?

Strange: No. So, that's true; The Baragon files exist. We have all that stuff, but Baragon was never finished.

In order to finish Baragon, I'd have to bring in new animators. I'd have to bring in new audio. We'd have to create a bunch of new data that didn't exist before. Obviously, we did create Baragon for the second Godzilla game. People think of them as similar, but we did not use a single thing from the first Godzilla game in the second Godzilla game. It is 100% built from scratch. It's the same people with the same ideas, but the skeletons are different. The animations are different. The whole combat system is different. So, yeah, we do have Baragon assets that were built for Godzilla 1, but we don't have a complete set, so there was never any possibility of bringing that over.

Maybe the second biggest question I've seen so many people talk about is, there were some Xbox exclusive maps and locations. Is that something we can expect to see in the remaster, or are those locked onto that system?

Strange: I'm not going to answer that question at this time.

Did you know that you were making a game that would stick with so many people back in the 2000s? And is that same special sauce, I guess you could say, in this Remaster, in your opinion?

Strange: We definitely didn't know. Pipeworks had worked on a thing, a thing and a half, before this, but Godzilla was the first console game that Pipeworks actually published, finished, and it was not clear. I mean, just very briefly, Pipeworks was working on a thing, started to staff up, and then that fell apart, and they had to let their staff go. Then, they had this Godzilla; it was a backup sort of thing that was going, and they said, 'Well, maybe the Godzilla thing is actually going to happen.'

I was the first person hired to staff them up for that Godzilla project, so it was really just founders and me making this Godzilla thing. It was not clear that we were going to succeed. Maybe this whole Pipeworks thing wasn't going to succeed. They'd lost a project. It was like, 'We had to let people go. If this Godzilla thing doesn't go, that's it. We close up shop.' We were definitely scrambling. We weren't like, 'Let's make it really good.' We were just… we were in survival mode for sure.

I mean, I had a young child, and I was like, 'I really want to keep making these video games.' I'd moved back to [Eugene, Oregon] to join Pipeworks, and I was like, 'This is very exciting, but we got to really hit this one.' I'd say, really quickly, once we launched it, we knew that we had something really good, and that was really exciting going into making all the future games and making [Rampage: Total Destruction].

That was very exciting. This was a discussion that I had with Pipeworks’ chief technology officer Dan White. We were talking about this initial thing, and he was like, 'Well, how do we know it's going to have that same feel? How are we going to get the feel? Where does that feel come from? That's a hard thing to do.' I was like, 'Dan, I'm right here. I know exactly how to get the team to reproduce the original feel, because the original game feel was a deliberate goal, not some unintended accident.' I'm the combat and controls and monster guy. I said, 'That's my focus. I promise you, we're going to get it,' and we did. So, that feels really good.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, Pipeworks, Godzilla in general, or anything like that?

Strange: I'd say I really like working in Pipeworks. I think Pipeworks is a great place. I've been really lucky to be able to work here for so long. It's a lot of fun. They've got this great Godzilla room that they made for us, and we were doing screenings of Godzilla films at the theater down the street with the team. That's great to have that sort of support. I'm really pleased that Toho and Atari want to keep going with this. I know when you're a fan, you're just like, 'Make the thing that I want,' but there's a lot that goes into it. There are a lot of decisions, a lot of things that have to line up to make these things happen, and it's great when they line up, and we should always be thankful when projects work out and line up.

I did want to say one other change we made to the game. Here we go. Your exclusive announcement: We have cut Hedorah from the game.

Oh, wow.

Strange: Because I always hated it. I hated it. It was in the plan. Like, 'Hedorah sometimes shows up as a stage hazard.' In the original game – a lot of people may only vaguely be aware – Hedorah, the Smog Monster, sometimes, 25% of the time, would just randomly be in a level. He was just flying around in his little flying blob form – couldn't even see it – except that it would cut your energy regeneration down to 20% of normal. In the original game, one quarter of the time, your energy regeneration just doesn't work, and you don't know why. Why is that? It's like, 'Hedorah is there.' I was like, 'Is he? I can't see.' Sometimes, if the camera's just right, it'd be like, 'What was that blob?' I didn't know that. We didn't tell you that. We didn't indicate it.

It was super hard to see. Do you know who Hedorah is? Why is it there? Then, if you could shoot your beam and hit Hedorah – which you can't because you can't even see it – it was terrible. It was a terrible system. It was, like, a quarter of the time the game is a lot less fun. That was on the list. That was the number one thing on the list when we were remaking the game. It was like, 'Yeah, we're cutting that because that was stupid.' Just make the game less fun sometimes. No, no. So, there we go. We have cut Hedorah from the game.

I definitely remember having that same experience when I was younger, being like, 'Where's my power? I have no idea what's going on,' and then eventually learning. That's hilarious that Hedorah got cut.

Strange: Yeah. Yep. Kill it with fire. No fun. No fun at all.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

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