IGN gave Atari and Pipeworks' Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee an 8.4/10 review when it launched in 2002. At the time, we said, "as far as multiplayer experiences go, Godzilla represents one of GameCube's very best." Now, senior designer Simon Strange and the rest of the team are back and ready to do it all over again.
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is something fans have pleaded for but never thought would actually happen. After all, it's been 24 years since the original game came out, and with no sign of the arena brawler series since Godzilla: Unleashed stomped onto the scene in 2007, there's been little hope for a proper return. That changes this November.
With remastered graphics, a playable Showa-era Mechagodzilla, and a few new irradiated bells and whistles, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is set to arrive at a time when kaiju fans are in desperate need of a standalone game featuring the King of the Monsters. IGN spoke with Strange to learn about how things have changed since he first helped bring the original game to players in the 2000s.
From the decision to cut the Smog Monster, Hedorah, to launching so close to GTA 6 and the potential for Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed remasters, we talked about (almost) everything Godzilla fans could ever want to know about Pipeworks' return to the franchise. You can read the conversation in its entirety below while we wait for Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered to launch for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S November 3, 2026.
IGN: It's been almost 24 years since the original Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee came out. Why do a remaster now, and why is 2026 the perfect time for more Godzilla from Pipeworks?
Simon Strange: We've been wanting to do a remake of this game for years. We've talked about it for at least a decade. A big obstacle for a lot of that time was that the original game was made in our own proprietary engine, which is called Spigot. Internally, we still have a lot of the engineers who worked on Spigot, and we said, 'If we wanted to revise these games, does that mean bringing Spigot up, getting back into that, working it with the new versions of DirectX, having to support all the new consoles?' We're very much an engineering company. The engineering behind revitalizing the old engine was the big obstacle, but a different idea that came up two, two and a half years ago is that part of our Spigot engine was we compiled all of our data into a proprietary format.
One of the engineers who had written those compilers was like, 'I could just write a tool that would recompile those into generic formats that are used by other engines.' He did that, so we were suddenly able to bring all of those assets from the original game out of Spigot and put them into other engines, like Unreal, in this case. As soon as we could do that, I just started playing around with stuff, and I was like, 'Oh, look, I got the characters working. Oh, look, I brought the cities in.' Then we were basically off to the races.
Then, it was just a matter of getting in touch with Atari, getting in touch with Toho, and 'Look what we've got!' We started to put all the things together. So, that was really sort of the genesis there, is that, instead of using the old engine and bringing it up to modern standards, bringing the assets out of the old engine into new engines that are already working on modern standards.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-big-godzilla-destroy-all-monsters-melee-remastered-interview-launching-against-gta-6-cutting-hedorah-and-staying-mostly-faithful-to-a-gamecube-classic
