1989 is a year that can be remembered for many things. The fall of the Soviet Union, Tim Berners Lee inventing the World Wide Web, the bringing down of the Berlin Wall, and even (these days) the birth of Taylor Swift.

Who would have thought I would be here reminiscing about the news of an old classic 1989 shoot ‘em-up from one of the most popular developers of the time, Rainbow Arts some 35 years later?

Just to prove that stupid game names are not a new phenomenon today we will be looking at the announcement of X-Out Resurfaced. Pronounced Cross Out but certainly not spelled that way, X Out was a fantastic side-scrolling shooter that owed a heap to the likes of R-Type and Gradius and was a fantastic success on the outgoing Commodore 64 but more so on the new breed of 16-bit home computers such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST (I’m just pausing here to wipe my teary eyes – I must have got something in them.)

Taking the idea of R-Type’s big robo-fish, X-Out is set underwater and as you can see from the clever trailer below, pays a lot of homage to its heritage. It’s great to see it’s not gone all 3D and retains a retro pixel look, brought up to date with modern tech and the music sounds just lovely to my shmup-loving ears.

Published by Inin, a subsidiary of Germany’s United Games who we also saw the recent Bubble Bobble remake from, X-Out won’t be with us until winter of this year but when it does it will be arriving on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox some 35 years after it first turned up on cassette and three and a half inch floppy disks.

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