Robotic thriller Binary Domain sold terribly when it came out nearly a decade ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve seen the last of it. Yakuza series producer Daisuke Sato is once again keeping hope alive for the shooter’s cult following.
“Personally, I’d really like to,” Sato said in a recent interview with the French website GameBlog when asked about the possibility of making Binary domain backwards compatible on Xbox Series X/S. “If possible, I’d like to make a few changes that I didn’t quite get to back then and maybe redo some parts, too.”
Originally released back in 2012 on the PS3 and Xbox 360, Binary Domain is one of those games that will occasionally come up in casual conversation, and, if the right person is around and you tell them you haven’t played it, will cause them to lose their shit and have a copy of the game immediately sent priority mail to wherever you live.
On the surface, Binary Domain looks like every other Call of Duty rip-off from that time, and its third-person shooting ranges from fine to tedious, but underneath is a fascinating tale of near future environmental collapse, robotic uprising, and interrogation of the human condition. Plus there’s a lovely robot in a red scarf who speaks with a French accent for no reason.
Unfortunately, Binary Domain is one of the rare games that hasn’t made it into Xbox’s backwards compatibility program. Sure it’s on PC, but really it’s a perfect candidate for the framerate boost and other enhancements Xbox Series X/S has been doling out to old games. And if the the shutdown of the PS3 store is truly eminent, it’ll soon be that much harder to easily get hold of to play.
This isn’t the first time Sato has egged Binary Domain fans on. “As far as I’m concerned, I would love to make a sequel,” he said back in a 2018 interview. “It is purely a question of practicality and administration. It’s up to Sega to decide whether or not they want to do it.”
We’ll see if Sega finally gets the message.
Correction - 3:06 p.m. ET, 3/25/21: the source of the translated quotes has been update.