In a bid to expand their Transformers franchise in the gaming industry, Hasbro has encountered unexpected challenges. The renowned toy company, riding high on recent successes, plans to rekindle the Transformers’ presence in video games. However, their efforts have been hampered by the loss of several older titles due to the expiry of their licensing agreement with Activision in 2018. Notably, Transformers: Devastation, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, and Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark were among the casualties, leaving fans unable to access these beloved games on digital marketplaces.
During this year’s San Diego ComicCon, a Hasbro spokesperson addressed questions about the possibility of re-releasing these games, revealing an unexpected hurdle. Surprisingly, Activision seems to have misplaced the source code for some of these titles, hindering any plans for reissuing them. Despite their stature as a prominent games publisher, Activision Blizzard appears to have struggled to maintain an easily accessible archive of their own titles’ assets, even for relatively recent games like Devastation, which was released in 2015.
The situation has become an ongoing frustration for Hasbro, especially as they launched the Gamer Edition line of toys, intending to mirror designs from the video games. To create the toys accurately, Hasbro had to rely on secondary assets as they couldn’t find some of the necessary deco details, resorting to using older platforms and 3D models from the games themselves.
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Although Hasbro does have some game assets from Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, obtaining complete assets from other titles has been a hit-and-miss process. For Transformers: War for Cybertron, they had to undertake the laborious task of ripping the assets themselves, as Activision provided concept art instead of the required CAD files.
Activision previously held the Transformers license from 2006 until it expired in 2017, after which all of its available Transformers games were removed from the market. The collection of games produced by Activision during this period is quite diverse, encompassing tie-ins to movies and various cartoon iterations, as well as some semi-original takes, totaling at least ten titles (list available here).
Despite the challenges, Hasbro remains determined to give these beloved titles another chance, acknowledging that while some may not stand the test of time, others will undoubtedly be cherished by fans. However, it is puzzling to see a publisher of Activision’s caliber encounter difficulties in preserving its past work for such a significant and popular license.
Hasbro’s excitement for the future remains undeterred, with a major title from Splash Damage on the horizon and a commitment to revive the Transformers video game legacy. As discussions with Microsoft and Xbox progress, the hope is that missing game assets will be unearthed, paving the way for potential re-releases and perhaps even inclusion in the Game Pass, allowing a new generation of gamers to experience these classic Transformers adventures.