James Pond’s Creator Is Not Happy With The Series’ Allegedly AI-Generated Legacy Collection

“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.”

System 3

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.”