Sunsoft Is Back Retro Game Selection 2 Revives Ikki, Atlantis no Nazo, Super Arabian and Maharaja

Sunsoft announces Retro Game Selection 2 for Switch, PS5 and PC on December 17, compiling formative 1980s Famicom titles including Ikki and archival rarity Maharaja.

Sunsoft is continuing its excavation of its early Famicom catalogue with SUNSOFT is Back! Retro Game Selection 2, scheduled for 17 December 2026 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and PC. The new compilation contains four games from the company's formative 1980s period: Super Arabian, Ikki, Atlantis no Nazo and Maharaja. It is an appealingly strange selection because Sunsoft has resisted the temptation to fill the package exclusively with universally praised classics. Ikki, released on Famicom in 1985 after an arcade version, became so notoriously criticised that Japanese writer Jun Miura is often credited with popularising the term kusoge, literally rubbish game, in connection with it. Yet Ikki has survived for four decades precisely because imperfect videogames can become culturally important in ways review scores never predict. Atlantis no Nazo is another notoriously difficult Sunsoft release, sending players across a huge network of stages containing obscure warps, hidden routes and secrets that practically demand outside knowledge. Super Arabian adapts Sunsoft's earlier arcade platform game for Nintendo hardware, while Maharaja is the real archival curiosity. The 1989 Famicom RPG and adventure hybrid has rarely escaped Japan and is receiving what Sunsoft describes as its first new home-console port since the original era. Modern convenience features should make these famously unforgiving games substantially easier to explore. Save functionality and rewind will be available, allowing players to recover from mistakes that once meant repeating substantial portions of a game. A gallery includes historical materials such as original artwork, flyers and development-related imagery, which is particularly valuable in a collection built around software from the first half of the Famicom era. Japanese physical editions are planned for Switch and PlayStation 5 alongside digital versions, while a collector package will include extras such as soundtrack material and merchandise. Collections like this are most interesting when publishers move past the obvious hits. Sunsoft could rerelease Blaster Master indefinitely, but doing so would preserve only the company's successful international identity. Ikki, Maharaja and similarly odd titles document what Japanese console development actually looked like in the mid-1980s: experimental, frequently awkward and still discovering what kinds of games worked with a controller and cartridge. Retro history is more useful when it includes the strange failures alongside the masterpieces, and Retro Game Selection 2 seems unusually willing to do exactly that.