Bubsy and his platforming ilk remind me in a strange, tangled way of high-frequency trading. This is the dodgy Wall Street manoeuvre, as detailed in Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, in which money men exploit their speedy internet connections and clever algorithms to spot your buy order leaving your computer, get in front of it, grab the stock you want and then sell it to you for a tiny profit - a tiny profit that becomes an enormous profit when you scale it up to the point where you're pulling this off a gajillion times a day.
Stick with me here: high-frequency traders only lurk in the financial markets because you do. Bubsy only lurks in the market for platformers because of other, better platformers, combined with the Bubsy designers' sly hope that all that retro-platforming desire washing around means that there is a bit of money left over for them. So if high-frequency traders exist because you want to buy something; Bubsy exists because you want to buy something else. The big difference, I reckon, is that Michael Lewis is never going to write a book about Bubsy.
Regardless, after many years away, the series has returned to us in the form of Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back.
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