If we had written this headline thirty years ago, it still would have sounded odd. In 2026, though, it feels even stranger: the director of Alone in the Dark is now turning to crowdfunding for a brand-new SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis game, and he wants to ship it with a dedicated controller of its own.

Frédérick Raynal, one of the pioneers of survival horror and the director of 1992’s Alone in the Dark, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new game being developed for the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis 16-bit console. The project is a reworked version of his own 1988 PC game PopCorn, and at the moment it sits a little above the halfway mark of its funding target on Kickstarter. PopCorn itself is a Breakout-style brick breaker, while the new release is called PopCorn: Duel.

If the campaign reaches its goal, the package will also include a dedicated PopCorn Spinner controller. Speaking to Time Extension, Raynal explained that he had not originally planned to expand the project this far, but a personal loss changed its direction completely. He said that a little over a year ago, his friend David Mekersa from GameCodeur.fr, who writes books about learning programming, got in touch with him. Mekersa wanted to build a C programming course for the Mega Drive using SGDK and asked whether Raynal had an older game that would be a good fit for that purpose. Raynal immediately thought of PopCorn, the brick breaker he had made in 1988, the same year the console itself was released. The game is still well known among older players around the world, and Raynal said he also has a deep affection for that era and for the time he spent making it with Christophe Lacaze.

The Project Eventually Became a Personal Tribute

According to Raynal, he began building the adaptation in a very gradual and educational way. At first it was only a paddle and a ball, then bonuses, monsters, and everything else followed step by step. The tragic turn in the story is that David became seriously ill and passed away while the project was still underway. By then the adaptation was nearly finished, and Raynal decided to complete it as a tribute to his friend. He also pointed out that the Mega Drive never had a controller of this type before, while similar devices made for arcade cabinets were expensive and bulky.

Once he had a prototype of the spinner controller in hand, Raynal says the interest shown by his friends convinced him that the idea was strong enough to support a crowdfunded release. That is how the Kickstarter campaign came together, turning the project into a mix of nostalgia, retro hardware experimentation, and a very personal act of remembrance.

Source: VGC, Time Extension, Kickstarter