It had blatant sexual references, swearing and nudity. It also featured a black protagonist, Michael LeRoi, whose powers emerged from a voodoo artefact known as the “Mask of Shadows” that was grafted to his chest and allowed him to travel between our world and a plane known as Deadside.

The game was a lengthy romp for players and featured game design similar in essence to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time -- a facet it was lauded for given that the narrative nature of Shadow Man was more than enough to keep it from being branded a Zelda “knock off”. In 2002 a sequel called Shadow Man: 2nd Coming was released exclusively for PS2, but did not rate or sell as well as the original.

The original also featured a critically acclaimed score that arguably propelled the epic possibilities with horror beyond anything cheesy or B-Grade, it even featured Jack the Ripper as its launching point for the evil to follow in LeRoi's adventure.

Reason for Revival: Apart from the ironic point of reviving a game about the afterlife, zombies and demons, Shadow Man’s art-direction, open-world design and mature narrative would make it a solid fit in today’s market. While so many other games offer “maturity” as a selling point, it comes first-hand in the design of Shadow Man, and with more sophisticated consoles and PC hardware driving the visual and geographical side of game-design today (and tomorrow), there’s very little reason to think this wouldn’t work. Moreover, like games such as Dead Space or even Resident Evil, the Shadow Man universe would also be ripe for transmedia exploitation, potentially offering up a game series or franchise with serious longevity.

Battletoads
Original Platforms: NES, GameBoy, SNES, MegaDrive

Despite its unrelenting difficulty, Battletoads is remembered fondly by a majority of gamers from the 8-bit era. Developed by Rare at the beginning of the company’s glory days in the early 90s (a precursor to their breakout success in Donkey Kong Country), Battletoads was a side-scrolling brawler starring a pair of anthropomorphic toads facing off against a buxom, scantily-clad evil woman and her army of rat and robot minions to rescue the obligatory princess and the not-so-typical captured toad brother.

The game was known best for its high degree of challenge, with many players never seeing past the notorious speeder bikes stage -- the third level of the game, that featured a high-speed endless runner scenario requiring fast reflexes and long memory-sequences -- but it was its innovations to the rather vanilla brawler genre at the time that kept the persistent players coming back for more punishment, with cooperative play to boot.

While arcade brawlers like Double Dragon, Final Fight, and Streets of Rage evolved on their combos and special moves, Battletoads featured more diverse gameplay variety, with several different implementations of vertical and horizontal progression over thematically distinct environments. The comical nature of the toads also drove humour and creativity in the narrative and combat, as the affectionately-named Rash, Zitz, and Pimple could perform an assortment of super attacks whereby their appendages would turn into novelty-sized weapons to pummel opponents.

Reason for Revival:: Brawler contemporaries like Rockstar’s The Warriors, Castle Crashers, and recent open-world games such as Sleeping Dogs, and the Batman Arkham series show that plenty of elements from the classic genre are still relevant to modern audiences.

The SNES follow-up, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, failed to really capture the magic of the original, and the various other skews merely mirrored it, but if a developer today was given a reasonable budget, and focused on retaining the core pillars -- gameplay variety, challenging difficulty, cooperative play, and colourful humour -- the result could be amazing.

Following Rare’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2002, the Xbox manufacturer is the current rights holder of the franchise, and the thought of a new Battletoads game on their upcoming next-generation console is pant-tentingly tantalising. Our dream Battletoads revival would feature a little more crude-humour and gratuity than the NES original, core gameplay something in the vein of the massively-underrated brawler Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (itself a top revival contender), with a bunch of offbeat levels to mix things up, and three-player cooperative throughout.

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We'll be back tomorrow with another three games or franchises we think deserve the modern or future gaming treatment, but obviously before then, features like this are an obvious talking-point, so we invite you to come on in and agree or disagree with what we have already, and obviously offer your own classic games or franchises you'd like to see make it back into the gaming fray.

To be continued...