Radiant Silvergun XBLA port unlikely

Treasure CEO Masato Maegawa has reiterated that the developer would like to release cult Saturn and arcade shooter Radiant Silvergun on Xbox Live Arcade, but isn't sure whether it will actually happen.

"I think we'd definitely like to see it out there. But the situation around that game is a bit different from Ikaruga, so I don't know if we'd see it on Live," Maegawa told Gamasutra.

Apparently he's not the only one who fancies it either. "Microsoft actually asked us if we could put it out," he added.

So what's the problem? Well, in Maegawa's view Treasure wouldn't be able to simply repackage the existing code, as it did with Ikaruga last April, "without having to do or add a great deal to the game".

"If you play Radiant Silvergun nowadays," he pointed out, "it's certainly aged in assorted ways, and I'm not sure they're all good."

Given Treasure's size (Maegawa said he believes 20-30 people is the ideal size for a studio, and has no ambition to grow further), and current workload (including an untitled Xbox 360 shooter and Sin & Punishment 2 for Nintendo), you can see why it's difficult to commit.

However, it's worth recalling that Treasure's spoken about its desire to re-release Radiant Silvergun in the past. Speaking to 1UP prior to the Tokyo Game Show in 2007, for example, Maegawa reportedly said that an enhanced, high-definition version of the game was a something the company would like to do in future.

As other bits of the internet would put it, if Treasure likes talking about Radiant Silvergun so much, why don't they go live there?

Radiant Silvergun - infamously one of the most difficult-to-obtain second-hand Saturn games - is a vertical scrolling shooter where players fire one of seven weapons based on particular button combinations.