Oddworld Inhabitants Back In The Game With Citizen Siege

Many of us here mourned the day Oddworld Inhabitants - with their Abe series - abandoned the PC, in favour of other platforms. Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus were surely some of the finest platformers ever, and so having to endure for almost eight years with no other Oddworld game on the PC has been rather painful. The wait is still not over, alas, but at least we now have something to look forward to - and that something is called Citizen Siege.

It's not just a video game, and it's not just a CG animation: it's both. Oddworld Inhabitants are simultaneously developing Citizen Siege as a game and a movie, aiming to create an original property, a "politically edgy sci-fi action thriller".

"Abe's Odyssey was a genre busting original game and was the first one I fell in love with", said John H. Williams (the guy mostly credited for the Shrek series). "Citizen Siege promises to be an action thriller that, like other great science fiction stories, also has incredible poignancy to the universal issues of our time."

After developing and producing Shrek at Dreamworks, Williams has now taken upon himself to produce the Citizen Siege movie, with Oddworld Inhabitants co-founders Lorne Lanning acting as director, and Sherry McKenna acting as executive producer.

Developed side by side with the CG movie, the video game version of Citizen Siege is said to be utilizing the same collection of art assets, and is already being seen by a number of big-name publishers. It's still not clear what final form the game will take, since the two products will continue to influence each other as they grow. But if it turns out to be as wacky and enjoyable, as the first Abe games, Citizen Siege should be worth the wait.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)