One of the frustrations of being an Evercade collector is watching a cartridge you missed get retired and then immediately begin its second career as an overpriced secondhand listing. It is a natural consequence of how physical distribution and software licensing work, but that does not make it any less annoying when a cart you want is no longer available at retail. There may be some relief on the horizon, though.
In a recent conversation with Retro Gamer magazine, Blaze CEO Andrew Bryatt was asked directly whether any retired Evercade cartridges might return to production. His response was brief but pointed: “Watch this space.” That is about as far from a confirmation as you can get while still leaving the door meaningfully open, and it has understandably generated some chatter in the Evercade community, no doubt excited to play these games on their incoming Nexus.
Blaze has retired a number of cartridges over the life of the platform, and a handful of those have since climbed to eye-watering prices on the secondary market. The Piko Interactive Collection 1 and the Oliver Twins Collection are among the titles that come up regularly when fans discuss what they wish they had grabbed before it disappeared. For anyone who got into the ecosystem late, those carts represent a gap in a physical collection that cannot easily be filled without paying well over original retail.
Whether a re-release program would involve the same cart versions, updated packaging, or something else entirely is not yet clear. The licensing arrangements that govern these releases are presumably of the same complexity that led to some retirements in the first place, so bringing carts back is unlikely to be a simple matter of pressing more units.
Still, Bryatt’s answer was not a flat no, which, for a platform that has built its identity around accessible physical retro gaming, is a reasonable thing for fans to hold onto. Whether anything concrete materialises from that “watch this space” is the next question.
Source: Time Extension
