Sony shows footage of mysterious Patapon project

Sony appears to be teasing a new project in the Patapon franchise.

During its CES press conference on Monday, the tech firm debuted a video showing projects from its new Torchlight visualization facility.

Towards the end of the video, Torchlight debuted footage of what appears to be the Gravity Rush movie, as well as new footage of an unnamed Patapon project labelled, “IP development gaming / anime.”

Sony did not elaborate on whether the mysterious project was a game, an animation project, or simply a test.

Originally released for the PSP handheld in 2007, Patapon is a rhythm-based 2D platform / action game in which players command an army of cute anthropomorphic eyeballs known as “Patapons” that can be commanded to move forward, attack, defend and retreat by using a sequence of drum beats.

The game received two sequels on PSP, and the first two games were remastered with 4K visuals on PlayStation 4.

Last year, the developers behind Patapon spiritual successor Ratatan raised ten times their Kickstarter goal at ¥219.3 million ($1.5m / £1.19m).

Speaking to VGC, Hiroyuki Kotani, who designed the original Patapon games, didn’t rule out working with Sony on a traditional sequel in the future.

“Patapon was a really unique experience at the time of its release and reflected the development environment of that era. We wanted to make another game like that for the modern age,” he said.

“There’s a possibility of maybe doing a Patapon sequel in the future, but for this we really wanted to make our own game, in our own style, with specific types of gameplay that reflect what we want. After that, if there’s a chance to speak to Sony about doing a Patapon sequel then we’ll go from there.”