This Retro Commodore 64 Game Collection Features Comics Made By Marvel and DC Veterans

Ziggurat, the company behind the re-releases of retro games like Rendering Ranger: R2, has just announced a new collection of ten Commodore 64 classics. It will be released in May and will include some digital comics created by Ant Williams and Andy Lanning, who have experience working for comic book giants like Marvel and DC.

The collection in question is Cosmi: Forbidden Forests, and it gets its name from one of the Commodore 64 games included in the collection and the developer that made them. All of the games included were published for Commodore 64 by Cosmi, which dominated as a game publisher during the reign of computer gaming on the likes of the Commodore 64, Atari Home Computer Systems, Apple II, and Amiga. Ziggurat now owns the rights to these Cosmi games and is finally re-releasing many of their most notable games in one place.

The following ten games are confirmed to be part of Cosmi: Forbidden Forests at release:

• Forbidden Forest
• Beyond the Forbidden Forest
• Aztec Challenge
• Caverns of Khafka
• Seal
• Delta Man
• Chomp!
• Chernobyl: Nuclear Power Plant Simulation
• Spite & Malice
• Navcom 6: The Persian Gulf Defense

As is the case with many retro re-releases nowadays, players will be able to experience these games in their original form, but they can also use seamless save states and rewind features to help them out during gameplay. Cosmi: Forbidden Forests will also feature a gallery of ads and manuals used to promote these games back when they came out. The work on this collection isn’t stopping there, though.

Ziggurat has developed a remastered version of Forbidden Forest, giving the game a toggleable art style inspired by 14th-century tapestry and more modern audio. It’s a unique aesthetic we don’t often see in video games. The closest comparison I can think of is Pentiment, and that looks much different than the remastered version of Forbidden Forest.

Cosmi: Forbidden Forests also comes bundled with digital comics made by Ideas & Inks. That’s a company that was created by Ant Williams, a comic book artist known for his work on DC’s Batman: Two Faces and The Superman Monster, and Andy Lanning, a writer who has authored comic books based on The Legion of Super Heroes, Resurrection Man, Nova, and The Authority. They previously worked with Zigguart to create comics based on Slave Zero X.

Platforms like the NES or Sega Genesis tend to get a lot more love when it comes to retro re-releases, so it’s neat to see a collection entirely dedicated to Commodore 64 games. This will be the best way to play all these Cosmi-published titles as soon as it launches.

Cosmi: Forbidden Forests launches for PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch on May 27.