PREVIEW // Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is my dream Digital Eclipse remaster collection

Of all of the franchises for the undeniable masters of retro at Digital Eclipse to dig up for their next compilation, I hardly expected to see the likes of theToy Story licensed video games – but I could not be more pleased. Pixar’s breakout 3D animation hit was my obsession at a very young age, and so the corresponding games became mainstays in my library. So much so that I still regularly return to the PS1’s Toy Story 2, every level, every sight and sound forever burned into my brain.

Which is to say that a simple HD re-release of the bulk of the Toy Story games would have been more than enough for me, making it all the more special that Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is in such good hands. If you’ve played the likes of Atari 50, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, Tetris Forever or Mortal Kombat: Legacy Collection you’ll know exactly what the name Digital Eclipse means. It means more than just a straightforward collection ports, and instead a tailored and curated experience that makes each game as playable in the modern sense as possible while preserving authenticity. It also means a plethora of historical content and educational tidbits, and a bespoke UI to suit what’s important and memorable about the chosen franchise.

For my demo Retro Roundup! I sat with Digital Eclipse’s Head of Production, Stephen Frost, in Atari’s understated, chill booth among the chaos of the Gamescom 2026 business halls. Frost starts be telling me that the studio working on a Toy Story licensed video game collection is no accident. Digital Eclipse sees a huge number of pitches from potential external partners, which means it has the freedom to be picky and won’t accept a project unless it’s something the entire team is excited about. And while it might seem strange for a group of game preservationists to be especially keen about some early-era Disney licensed titles, it’s equally about the story these games tell as it is their quality or place in culture.

In this case, there’s something in the timing of concurrent revolutions within the feature film and video game space that make the Toy Story games interesting. As Pixar was taking its pioneering steps into 3D rendering technology for feature films, so too was the games industry. Although the original Toy Story for the Super Nintendo and SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis was a 2D game, it used pre-rendered 3D sprites – a phenomenon that SNES players had seen in the likes of Donkey Kong Country but was unheard of on SEGA’s hardware. Some of the most important sprites, like Woody, were even created in-house at Pixar and given to developer Traveller’s Tales especially for the game. As these two industries continued to break new technological ground, they were also finding exciting synergy.

Of course, the PS1’s Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue was far from the first 3D platformer out there, but it’s a great look at the progression of video game visuals and gameplay in just four years. It also brings us to one of the interesting quirks in this collection – the inclusion of 1998’s A Bug’s Life, which is (spoiler) not a Toy Story game. Frost explains that the biggest reason for including A Bug’s Life is, simply, because it’s a crucial part of Traveller’s Tales history and the path to its work on Toy Story 2, likening it to something of a first pass at 3D platformer before the studio tackled arguably the “bigger” of Pixar’s feature film slate at the time.

As usual, the Digital Eclipse treatment as far as adapting these titles to current platforms is one of balancing authenticity and nostalgia with modern sensibilities. That means that the games are represented as closely as possible to their original forms, with plenty of options for players to tailor the experience to suit them. Whether that’s changing up the CRT filters, flicking over to a higher internal resolution or even tweaking gameplay with a new cheat code system and quick save/resume or rewind features to take a bit of the edge off of that classical difficulty.

One of the coolest details, that Frost very proudly points out to me, is that the virtual CRT TV which borders the game screen and helps fill out your widescreen display, is more than just some static set dressing. It goes through different iterations based on the types of TV you’d see in the eras the games were released in, customisable by the player of course, and you’ll also see some of the light/image reflected from the game being played around its bezel. It’s a small detail, one you may not even notice, that really reinforces the studio’s goal to make these games look and feel just how you remember them.

And of course, as I said up top, it wouldn’t be a Digital Eclipse joint without a bunch of supplementary materials and cool, digital historical artifacts. Retro Roundup! sports a heap of “virtual museum” content, from old design materials to manual and box scans, old development photos and more, as well as a music player that you can use to listen to the soundtracks from every included game. There are even new interviews with some prominent Disney, Pixar and Traveller’s Tales folks, which I’m very eager to take a look at.

I genuinely can’t think of a better scenario for reliving some of my favourite childhood games than filtered through the talented folks and uncontested masters of thoughtful game preservation and curation at Digital Eclipse. But even if you never experienced these games the first time around, or were less impressed with them, there’s so much neat history and so many fun details and options here that I can’t imagine anybody being displeased when it launches this October 15, for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch, Switch 2 and PC.

Thanks to Atari and Digital Eclipse for having me visit and chat Toy Story: Retro Roundup! at Gamescom 2026.