26 years later, Groundhog Day gets revived as… a VR game?

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  Strike up the music, the band has begun...

Here at Ars, decades of cheap, poorly made movie-to-game adaptations have made us deeply skeptical of the whole concept. For every Goldeneye or Lego Harry Potter out there, there are hundreds of quick cash-ins that give the whole idea a bad name.

Despite that well-earned skepticism, we're still at least a little intrigued by Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son. That's the new VR-exclusive semi-sequel to the hit 1993 Bill Murray movie being announced today (hey, happy Groundhog Day) by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality. It's coming "this year" to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.

If you're hoping to see Murray reprise his role as temporally-trapped Phil Connors, be aware that Like Father Like Son instead puts you in the shoes of "the charming but arrogant Phil Connors Jr." as the publisher-provided synopsis puts it. Dear old dad appears only in an Instagram-style photo montage in the trailer and in Junior's mind as a larger-than-life role model. "Living in his shadow was kind of tough," Junior opines at one point. Still, the press release does promise that "beloved characters from the 1993 film" will be making an appearance, and a slightly off-kilter version of good old Ned "The Head" Ryerson appears in a fever dream during the trailer.

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