Ape Escape May Finally Be Coming Back — Reportedly From the Sonic Mania Team’s Evening Star

RUMOR MILL

Let me be very clear about what this story is and isn’t: this is a rumor. Sony has not announced a new Ape Escape. Nobody with a PlayStation business card has said the words “Ape Escape” out loud in any official capacity. What we have is a growing pile of corroborating reports pointing at the same thing — and the thing they’re pointing at is genuinely exciting: a new Ape Escape, developed by Evening Star, the studio founded by Sonic Mania’ lead designer Christian Whitehead.

Here’s how the pile built up. In early October, insider NateTheHate posted on ResetEra that Sony has been pitching its dormant franchises to outside studios, with Ape Escape among them — and that the obvious first-party candidates were out: not Team Asobi (busy being the Astro Bot team), and reportedly not Bandai Namco. Then the speculation turned to Evening Star, the indie outfit whose senior staff made Sonic Mania and which released Penny’s Big Breakaway in 2024. And this week, two heavy hitters corroborated it: veteran journalist Jeff Gerstmann said on his podcast that Evening Star is indeed the developer, and VGC reported hearing the same from its own sources.

Why Evening Star actually makes sense

Let’s talk about the fit, because it’s genuinely good. Penny’s Big Breakaway was a 3D platformer with unusual controls, stylized visuals, and hordes of cutesy enemies — a game about chasing things around colorful playgrounds with a gadget. Now swap “chasing things” for “catching monkeys with a net” and tell me that’s not the same muscle. As Push Square put it, the leap from Penny to Ape Escape is not a big one.

There are also the little breadcrumbs the internet has been collecting: Evening Star’s CTO and Penny’s Big Breakaway game director Hunter Bridges is reportedly a fan of the series; the studio posted a job ad for a 3D character artist with experience modeling and animating anime-styled characters; and CEO Dave Padilla relocated to Tokyo in 2025 around the time hiring ramped up. None of that proves anything on its own — studios hire artists and executives move to Tokyo for lots of reasons — but stacked on top of Gerstmann and VGC’s reporting, it stops looking like coincidence.

Gerstmann’s version has one more detail worth noting: he described the project as recently greenlit and “not close to being out.” Translation: even if every word of this rumor is true, we are years away from catching a single monkey. Manage your hype accordingly.

Sony’s apparent playbook: revive the vault with indie help

The Ape Escape rumor doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it looks like one move in a broader Sony strategy. Per the same reporting, Sony is licensing its classic franchises to smaller third-party studios rather than tying up its big internal teams: Everybody’s Golf went to Bandai Namco, and the same rumor mill has a Killzone revival and an Uncharted revival (via Naughty Dog) floating around too.

Honestly? It’s a smart playbook. Sony’s first-party studios are all-in on massive tentpoles that take five-plus years to make. Meanwhile the company is sitting on a vault of beloved IP that defined the PlayStation brand — and a generation of indie studios grew up worshipping exactly those games. Handing Ape Escape to the Sonic Mania crew is the same logic Sega used when it handed Sonic to Christian Whitehead’s team in the first place, and that worked out pretty well for everyone involved.

The cruel irony: the studio that made Ape Escape, Japan Studio, was closed in April 2021, with much of its staff forming the core of Team Asobi — the very team NateTheHate ruled out. So the monkeys’ original keepers are gone, and their spiritual successors are busy with Astro Bot (which, fittingly, included an “Apes On The Loose” homage level — Sony knows exactly what it has in this franchise).

What Ape Escape even is, for the uninitiated

If you weren’t around in 1999: Ape Escape was the game that sold the DualShock. The original PS1 release built its entire control scheme around the twin analog sticks — one for movement, one for gadget aiming — and wrapped it in a gloriously silly premise: a monkey named Specter stole a time machine and scattered time-traveling apes across history, and it’s your job to catch them with a net. It was inventive, charming, and mechanically years ahead of its time.

The series then did what beloved series do — sequels, spinoffs, handheld entries, a PS3 Move title in 2010 — and then went quiet. Sixteen years quiet. An entire console generation grew up without a new Ape Escape, which is exactly why this rumor has people emotional. These aren’t just games; they’re the texture of a childhood for a lot of thirty-somethings.

And look, the bar for “revival done right” was set by the very people reportedly holding the net now. Sonic Mania didn’t just revive Sonic — it reminded the industry that the people who loved a series as fans often understand it better than the corporation that owns it. If anyone is going to get Ape Escape right, it’s the crew that already proved they can do this exact trick.

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