empire posts

A classic sci-fi novel that would seem on the surface to be perfect for adapting for a game isn't going to be made anytime soon. Our sister site Joystiq reports that developer Chair Entertainment has confirmed that its previously announced plans to release game based on author Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game are now on indefinite hold.

Chair Entertainment got a lot of hype back in January 2008 when it announced its plans for the game. It was going to base the Ender's Game title on the novel's "Battle Room" setting where humans participated in simulated skirmishes against the book's alien threat. So what happened? Basically, Epic Games happened. The developer bought Chair Entertainment just a few months after the Ender's Game announcement. Now Chair's co-founder Donald Mustard tess Joystiq that Epic wants Chair " ... to create original and unique franchises. I don't know that Ender's Game fits into that strategic objective anymore."

Chair just released the Unreal Engine 3 based iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch game Infinity Blade to great reviews and apparently huge sales.

Bestselling author Orson Scott Card has won an endless array of awards for his Ender's Game novels. His most recent endeavor, Empire, was a smash hit based on a video game concept from Epic Games-owned Chair Entertainment. The second novel in that trilogy, Hidden Empire, hits bookstores next month. The recent Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex is a prequel to these new sci-fi novels that focus on a modern day Civil War between the red and the blue states.

In this exclusive interview, Card took some time away from working on the screenplay for Paramount Pictures big screen adaption of Ender's Game to talk about his love of video games and his own personal dream game project. After all, Card ended up working on his newest trilogy because of a relationship that grew from his first video game work on Advent Rising (developed by the founders of Chair Entertainment when they worked at GlyphX Games).

This developer narrated video for Red Alert 3 - Uprising focuses on the Empire of the Rising Sun, its new story (continued from the aftermath of the main game) and some of the new units. The video also gives viewers a more in-depth preview of the mini campaign centered on the character Yuriko. The stand alone expansion is scheduled to release exclusively through digital download on March 12.

Download HD Red Alert 3 - Uprising Empire and Yuriko Campaign Walkthrough Video (124 MB)
Check out all Red Alert 3 - Uprising downloads

Best selling sci-fi author Orson Scott Card may be best known for his Ender series of novels but he has also kept a finger or two in the gaming industry. He wrote dialog for two of LucasArts' adventure games in the 1990s (The Dig and The Secret of Monkey Island) and wrote the story for the Majesco published sci-fi action game Advent Rising.

In a new interview with Card on the Scifi.com web site, he states that the previously announced game based on his near future novel Empire is still moving forward via Chair Entertainment (now owned by Epic Games).Card stated that a game based on his most well-know novel Ender's Game will move forward after Empire is completed. Card states, "My hope and plan is that the Ender's Game computer and console games will not be mere tellings of the story, but rather true games with a high degree of replayability. In other words, you don't play the game once, so you can act out the story (as with, say, the Harry Potter movie-based games), and then discard it."

Creative Assembly's Total War series of strategy games is one of PC gaming's most prestigious franchises; it began in 2000 with Shogun: Total War and has changed theaters and time periods several times since. Most impressively, it only seems to get better with each outing.

Creative Assembly has released a promotional video depicting the motion capture technology used to create animations of the thousands soldiers in the upcoming Empire: Total War. Apparently the studio is trying some new things, like capturing animations of multiple people simultaneously so characters in the game react to one another more realistically. They're also capturing animation for some kind of dueling system -- one on one combat. We're not sure what part dueling will play in the game, but it looks like a cool addition.

Empire: Total War will be the fourth title in the series (excluding expansion packs, of course); it's due towards the end of this year. Empire will be set during -- you guessed it -- the age of empire, and will focus on colonial expansion. For the first time in the series' history, it will expand the theater of war to include the entire globe and add real-time naval combat to the experience.

Epic Games is expanding their reach once again. The Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Gears of War developer (and creators of the much used Unreal Engine) have just announced they have purchased Utah-based Chair Entertainment. Specific financial details were not disclosed.

Chair Entertainment was formed in 2005 by Donald and Geremy Mustard. They previously worked at GlyphX, who developed the sci-fi action game Advent Rising (which used Epic's Unreal Engine 2). So far the only game Chair has released was the Xbox Live Arcade game Undertow (which used Unreal Engine 3) but they have already announced plans to develop a game based onthe "Battle Room" scenarios in Ender's Game, the classic sci-fi novel from writer Orson Scott Card. Chair also helped to develop Empire, a near future concept of a second American Civil War that Card wrote up as a novel of the same name in 2006 (a video game and movie are also in development)

The press release announcing the deal revealed that Chair Entertainment would continue to work under that name and will continue to develop new and original properties while using, naturally, Epic's Unreal Engine tech. This is the second time Epic has purchased a game developer. In 2007 it purchased Painkiller developer People Can Fly who helped Epic with the PC port of Gears of War and is currently working on a new and unannounced game.