The developers don’t have “a scrap of respect” for the series
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t recognize James Pond, the fish spy star of a series of platformers from the early 1990s. But there is a chance you’ve heard about the controversy surrounding the series’ upcoming <a href="https://system3.com/product/the-james-pond-legacy-the-pond-is-not-enough/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>James Pond Legacy: The Pond Is Not Enough, which collects versions of four James Pond games released across the Amiga, Genesis, Commodore 64 and SNES, and which fans have widely accused of being filled with AI-generated art. According to Time Extension, the collection has so enraged series creator Chris Sorrell that he’s on the record as hoping its developers “choke on an AI-generated fishbone.”
“I’m sure it won’t shock you to hear that I was in no way consulted or involved with this ‘legacy’ collection,” Sorrell shared with Time Extension. “For that to have happened there would have to have been someone with at least a scrap of respect for James Pond involved, when clearly, as their every action demonstrates, that’s very far from the case.”
Developer System 3 Software announced James Pond Legacy last week with a trailer that was immediately met with skepticism online, Kotaku writes. It didn’t help that the developer’s blog post defending the “painstaking, human-led process” that produced the game’s art also appeared to use generative AI images.
As Time Extension notes, Sorrell doesn’t own the rights to James Pond, and doesn’t have a say in how the series is presented. James Pond is now shared between System 3 and Gameware Europe, which announced its own, seemingly AI-generated, James Pond sequel in 2025. While the new art in the collection is apparently only used in its menus and box art, it does seem garish compared to the game’s original 2D characters and backgrounds. Rather than a respectful repackaging of the series, the legacy collection is, in Sorrell’s words, “a giant reminder of how soulless businessmen have been exploiting a brand for decades.”
