An 8,500-hour countdown clock is ticking down to an Ecco the Dolphin remaster and sequel reveal

A new Ecco the Dolphin game is in the works, and a countdown website is now ticking down to what I can only assume will be an official reveal when it hits the zero mark—which will happen in a little over 8,500 hours.

Okay, so 8,500 hours: That doesn't sound like all that long a wait, right? I'm sorry to say that it is. Bashing out some quick math, the number works out to roughly 355 days, which you'll recognize as just a little bit shy of an entire year. That's right, it's a year-long countdown: You could come back to it over the Christmas break and there will still be literal months left to go.

I'm 100% serious about this, by the way.

That's an unusually long haul for one of these reveal countdowns, which based on my experience typically clock in at maybe a week or two before the big unveiling happens—or the server crashes when everyone starts mashing the refresh button at the same time, as the case may be.

You might reasonably wonder, then, why anyone would kick off a timer for an event that's so far out, and the only guess I have is that it's a silly but effective way to get attention—here we are talking about it, after all. And just in case there's any doubt, no, this is not a joke: The timer was linked in an official Xbox interview with original Ecco the Dolphin producer Ed Annunziata.

"Me and the entire original team are going to remaster the original Ecco the Dolphin and Tides of Time games," Annunziata says. "Then we will make a new, third game with contemporary play and GPU sensibilities. Stay tuned to eccothedolphin.com."

Hitting that link takes you to the countdown at eccothedolphin.com—the eight thousand, five-hundred hour countdown.

Ecco the Dolphin was a hit when it launched on the Sega Genesis in 1992, ultimately being ported to various other platforms and spawning two sequels, The Tides of Time in 1994 and Defender of the Future in 2000. But the series has been moribund for the past 25 years, and an effort to fund a new Ecco-like on Kickstarter in 2013, called The Big Blue, fell far short of its goal. That's not a great sign, but this does seem like a good time for a full-on remaster: Oblivion Remastered is already one of the biggest games of 2025, and the Gears of War remaster we've been waiting on for three years is headed to Steam later this summer.

It's not clear what exactly will happen when the timer hits zero—whether the remaster will be formally revealed, or the new game, or both simultaneously, or something entirely different and less exciting, like a new crowdfunding campaign. Whatever's waiting behind the curtain, we've got time to speculate: The Ecco the Dolphin countdown timer is set to hit zero on April 25, 2026.