Anyone with a cursory knowledge of video games knows the significance of opening a treasure chest. Typically, you're rewarded with an item or weapon that can help you progress through the adventure.

Evoland Legendary Edition—a collection featuring Evoland: A Short Story of Adventure Video Games Evolution and Evoland II: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder—takes this trope to the absolute extreme. Opening a chest doesn’t give you an item or weapon but rather the building blocks of the game itself. You begin your adventure in a soundless, monochrome world where you can only walk to the right. Grab the treasure chest, and you're awarded with the ability to move left. Grab the chest on the left, and you can now move in the four cardinal directions.
 
As its name implies, the game continues to evolve with each chest you open. The next thing you know, you have screen scrolling. Sound effects. Enemies. Music. Color. Eventually, you find yourself in a fully realized game world with every single aspect of it having been “earned” by the player character. The concept is expanded from game to game as you unlock the ability to switch between 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and HD, each with its own fully rendered worlds, as you proceed on your quest to defeat the forces of evil.

The prototype for the first Evoland game was created for a 48-hour solo game jam by Nicolas Cannasse, who took inspiration from the 8- and 16-bit The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy titles of his childhood. “We kept these two pillars for the first complete game that was released,” says Cannasse, the founder and CEO of Shiro Games as well as the director of both Evoland titles. “Then for Evoland II, we added more styles of games.”

The first game kept things on the simpler side, featuring only a mixture of Final Fantasy and Zelda’s styles of gameplay. Evoland II blows the concept of evolving graphics and gameplay styles wide open, spoofing just about every genre of gaming imaginable. RPGs (both action and turn-based), platformers, fighting games, puzzle games, strategy games, beat 'em ups—name a genre, and the game tackles it. The team looked to the giants of each genre for inspiration. “I can't remember all of them, but Street Fighter, Mega Man, Double Dragon, Fire Emblem, and Chrono Trigger come to mind,” says Cannasse. “As long as it made sense to include these in Evoland II and it was possible to express their gameplay in a small time frame, we made sure to add them.”
As might be expected, there were various challenges that the team had to overcome to craft two entire games with multiple graphical styles while retaining consistency between them. The second game was particularly notable in that regard. As the player characters travel back and forth through variations of the past, present, and future, the graphical styles change accordingly. “There was a technical challenge to have the code working for different kinds of rendering,” Cannasse recounts. “In the first Evoland, the places that you can see both in 2D and 3D were limited, and in Evoland II, we decided to have different ‘times,’ so they are not always exactly the same places, although [they’re] very similar.”

The first game kept the story fairly minimal, clocking in at a modest three hours. Evoland II, by contrast, was designed to be a sweeping, 20+ hour time-traveling epic. “The first game was more of an evolution (pun intended) of the prototype Evoland during the game jam,” says Cannasse. “When we decided to start the second game, we thought, ‘What are we going to do differently?’ We decided to make a more complete JRPG adventure game. In these games, the world, the story, and the gameplay are all important. But we wanted to keep the light humor of the first Evoland while still telling a compelling story that is more complex and deep than it seems at first.”

Back when these titles were being developed, the Shiro Games team was rather small. Even with the team’s significant growth over the past decade, going from 10 or so employees to over 70, Cannasse still has fond memories of working alongside his small team on Evoland. “I remember having a lot of concentration writing the small dialogue scenes to advance the story and was very happy when at last I could get the feeling that I had in mind, building the relationship between the characters,” he says. “Making Evoland 1 and 2 are dear memories to me and the whole team that worked on these games. We are very happy to see that players keep enjoying the games years after release.”

Since the initial release of Evoland II in 2015, Shiro Games has moved on to other well-known and well-received titles like Northgard. Fans do wonder, though, if the ever-growing company might one day return to its roots and create an Evoland III. It’s a question the team gets asked frequently. Cannasse offers this answer: “I wonder what a possible Evoland III would be. I still don't have a precise answer. Maybe the fans do?”

Evoland Legendary Edition is available now on the Epic Games Store.