Red 5 Studios game

A number of former developers from Blizzard decided to leave the developer in order to make their own original game titles. No, we are not referring to ArenaNet or the now shut down Flagship Studios. Rather we are discussing Red 5 Studios. Announced over three years ago, the Orange County, California based studio (with offices in China) has been working on some kind of MMO project but so far there's no word on what it's about or when we will even see it.

Indeed the company has been fairly silent of late (it's last press release, to announce some new staff members, was made six months ago). Perhaps the team is taking some lessons from the fate of Flagship, which was heavily hyped but got its life cut short when its debut game Hellgate London bombed in sales and in reviews. Let's hope that Red 5 Studios doesn't share the same fate.

Human Head Studios/Marc Ecko game
In 2006, Atari released Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a action game that was supervised by the founder of the highly successful fashion line. The game got slammed by critics and did poorly in terms of sales despite a ton of advanced hype by both Ecko and Atari. However Ecko wasn't scared off by the response to his first game and in February 2007 it was announced that a new action game from Marc Ecko Entertainment was in the works.

The developer of the game is Human Head Studios, best known for the 2006 first person shooter Prey. However only a few months after the Marc Ecko game announcement, Human Head's offices in Madison, Wisconsin had to deal with a fire in their office's building. Human Head has since moved into new offices but it's currently unknown if the fire delayed the development of the game. Since the announcement over 18 months ago there has been no word on the status of the Human Head/Marc Ecko project

38 Studios MMO project (Copernicus)

A lot of pro athletes become commentators for TV and radio sports programs after they retire. For Curt Schilling, star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox it's going to be a different post-sports project. In 2006, he announced the founding of Green Monster Games (later renamed as 38 Studios), a Boston based game development studio that will create a fantasy MMO project.

Schilling has been a fan of MMO titles since the first Everquest game launched and his decision to help create his own product has brought in a number of major players in their own fields including comic book artist Todd McFarlane as art director and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore as its creative director. Little is known about the game itself except that its code name is Copernicus. A brief video was shown to a select audience at this year's Consumer Electronics Show but Schilling has said the video does not actually represent the game. While Schilling has assembled a solid dev team for the game the MMO genre is notorious for bringing down even the most experienced of teams so until we know more info about 'Copernicus" it's still anyone's guess if the final game will be a success.

Destineer spy game

Founded by former Bungie vice-president Peter Tamte, Destineer Studios is best known to hard core PC games for its release of Close Combat: First to Fight, a tactical shooter that was created with a lot of input from current and former members of the US Marine Corps. The game was released in 2005 but since then Destineer has concentrated on releasing value priced titles and Macintosh ports of PC games via its MacSoft brand.

But it is known that Destineer is also working on a new big budget game and that it has been hiring folks to work on the game for the past couple of years. So what could that game be? One big clue is in a 2005 press release announcing that Destineer had struck a deal with In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that's funded by none other than the Central Intelligence Agency. A 2006 press release also revealed Destineer's plans for a North Carolina dev studio that would work on training sims and commercial games "based on Destineer's work with the US intelligence community", Since then no actual info on the title has been revealed (hey it is the CIA) but a spy game that has actual support from real intelligence organizations could be very interesting indeed.