destineer posts

Many moons ago, Atomic Games was best known as the creator of the Close Combat series of WWII themed PC strategy games. Today that developer sent out a press release announcing its reformation (actually the developer said it re-formed in secret in 2006) with the co-founders of Red Storm Entertainment and veterans of Bungie, EA, and Activision.

Atomic's goal is to "usher in a new breed of Historical Action video games" and the Raleigh NC based company is already working on an unnamed shooter title for "one of the world's top 5 video game publishers." In fact Atomic had previously been a division of the game publisher Destineer but the Atomic web site states, "As Destineer's business publishing casual games for consoles and handhelds began growing very rapidly, Destineer spun out Atomic as a well-funded independent development studio."

Our sister site GameDaily has a chat with Atomic's president Peter Tamte who says, "We see Historical Action much more broadly than just war-based titles, and certainly much more broadly than the WWII games that have dominated the category." He also mentions that the developer has been funded in part by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that is funded by the CIA (yes, that CIA). Tamte states, "they invested in our company a few years ago in connection with some serious stuff we do for the U.S. intelligence community. There should be some interesting video games that evolve from this work, though."

In the PC game industry there are really only two types of games; those that are announced and those that are being developed currently in secret. These titles are what we are calling "black ops games". These are the titles that we know are in development but at the moment there's very little info on what these titles are even like, much less any word on a release date.

We have seen an example of this type of game earlier this week when it was revealed that Ensemble Studios was working on a planned MMO based on the Halo franchise. That game was canceled before the title was even announced and history is full of similar games that were being worked on but were canceled before they were officially revealed (of course there's also been a ton of games that were fully revealed but then canceled before their planned release...but that's another feature story)

So are there such black ops titles currently being made right now? You betcha. They are being created by the top developers in the business and range from first person shooter titles to RTS games to MMO projects. In this feature article, Big Download will take a look at a number of these games, some of which you may note even be aware of. However this is only the tip of the iceberg as many other PC games that we know nothing about are currently being developed as we speak...unannounced and still in the dark.