Ecco Creator Ed Annunziata talks about his inspiration for the undersea classic, and his goals to bring The Big Blue to the modern era.

As many of you may have already heard, Ecco's creator Ed Annunziatta has announced a sequel to the Sega Genesis classic Ecco 2: The Tides of Time. What many out there don't know is if he provided any clues on what this new Ecco the Dolphin would be about. For those of you out of the loop, Ed Annunziatta had nothing to do with Ecco, Defender of the Future, so hoping to see a continuation of it is fruitless, unless Ed decides to tie the two games stories together. So what do we know so far about Ecco the Dolphin 3?

Ed Annunziata is shy, but relentless. When pitching games, inconsistency is the consistent rule. A handful of guys sit silent at a conference table. Yesterday it was a marketing department and a lawyer; today it's a CEO and several producers. Tomorrow it will be a man from a toy company who knows nothing about games. Meetings never happen the same way twice. It's a dance that Ed Annunziata, the creator of Sega's ocean-based, sci-fi hit Ecco the Dolphin, is all too familiar with. To say that he's been in this room dozens upon dozens of times over the years is only half true. The location moves. The players change. Yet the goal remains the same: to pitch and pitch until something sticks.

There aren't very many good sources out there when it comes to making a 2D game. If you were to look, you'd find nothing except a few scattered examples that separately cover certain gaming topics. What bothered me the most about my quest to learn game development was most of the books out there cover 3D gaming topics using such libraries as DirectX, or OpenGL. The 2D books that do exist usually only cover classic arcade examples such as Pong, Space Invaders, etc. What you won't find are 2D programming books that show how to make a scrolling platformer, with coverage on topics like jump physics, handling barriers and interacting with other objects (like enemies, or power ups). If such a book does exist on 2D platformers, I can assure you it doesn't show how to do it the way developers did in the 8 and 16-bit eras.

Believe it or not, Ecco Defender of the Future was suppose to have sequel. Before Sega pulled the plug on the Dreamcast, Appaloosa (the company behind Ecco the Dolphin) toyed around with what could have been Ecco Defender of the Future 2. Keep in mind Ecco Defender of the Future is a reboot of the Ecco the Dolphin series and has nothing to do with the original games.