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The Game Archaeologist: Four online sci-fi titles no one remembers
In the MMO industry, science fiction has always taken the role of the overlooked little brother to big sister fantasy's popularity. Sure, there have been several online games that eschewed dungeons and dragons for spaceships and solar radiation poisoning, but even today the fantasy genre continues to be the dominant one in the genre. So not only have we had fewer online sci-fi games, but the ones that have attempted to make in-roads are all too soon forgotten. Over the years that I've been researching and writing The Game Archaeologist, I continue to come across these little games that have been all but forgotten by modern gamers, and many of these titles are indeed of a sci-fi bent. This week I'll be taking a look at four such games, including one that never even made it to launch, in an attempt to acknowledge their place at the family dinner table.
How 'Another World' almost became a point-and-click adventure
Famed game designer Eric Chahi shared an interesting yet somewhat terrifying anecdote about his legendary action-adventure Another World during his GDC talk today. It seems Another World nearly ended up being essentially another game. According to Chahi, when he got to the point of shopping the game around to potential publishers, he initially approached (the now defunct) Virgin Interactive. The company proceeded to try and sway him to rework the game into a point-and-click adventure since "that's what was popular at the time." Given the amount of work he'd already done on the game and the formidable task it would have been to re-tool all of it, Chahi decided to leave Another World alone. He went on to work with Delphine Software, which he described as being "very supportive" of the game as it was -- and how it will appear on iOS devices later this year.
Virgin Group returning to games, details forthcoming at E3
Mega-billionaire Richard Branson (look around your house -- there may be a document nearby indicating that he owns you) once had a game publishing company called Virgin Interactive, responsible for releasing the original Command & Conquer, the Lands of Lore games and, of course, the NES classic Color a Dinosaur (pictured above). Now, Virgin has formed a new "Virgin Gaming" initiative and will return to the game industry in an unspecified capacity. This could be the return of Virgin's game download service, which we last heard about in 2007 -- but we won't know for sure until further details are announced at E3.
