When Garibaldi helped unify Italy, the story goes that he had only one request. In return for his hard work, he wanted a year's supply of macaroni. I have never looked into this business too deeply, because I don't want to find out that it isn't true, but still - isn't that kind of a weird thing to ask for? Just macaroni? And just enough for a year?
The requests that history remembers tend to be the strange ones. There's Garibaldi and his macaroni, and then there's Mark Cerny and Knack. It sometimes seems that all Cerny demanded in return for making the PS4 an astonishing success was that Sony might help him knock out an archaic platformer-cum-beat-'em-up to play on it. And now we know the intriguing wrinkle that brings the story to life: just as Garibaldi wanted precisely a year's worth of macaroni, Cerny appears to have wanted not one but two archaic platformer-cum-beat-'em-ups made in his honour.
As a result of this, perhaps, the makers of Knack seem uncertain about its legacy. At times in Knack 2 the developers seem able to confront the fact that the original game was not an unqualified success. A character will quip about Knack's sorely limited repertoire of punches and kicks in days gone by, while the budget price tag the sequel comes with has a whiff of contrition to it.
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