Activision Gets Unreal Engine 3 For New Action Game

In a somewhat surprising (as in surprisingly late) announcement, publisher Activision revealed over the weekend that they have entered an agreement with Epic Games, to license their Unreal Engine 3 technology. The main reason behind the deal is an upcoming - and unannounced - action game, developed under Activision's supervision. And that's about all they had to reveal at this time, save for the following PR statements given by one of the publisher's officials, and by Epic's Mark Rein:

"The Unreal Engine is one of the most technically advanced engines on the market and is a perfect fit for our upcoming action game," said Laird Malamed, head of production for Activision. "The engine's robust suite of programming tools will enable our development team to deliver what is sure to be an amazing game experience."

"We're extremely excited to be working with Activision" said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, Inc. "We've admired them for a long time and we're pleased that they've chosen to use Unreal Engine 3 and we're confident they're going to make a great game with it."

As I'm sure many have pointed out by now, at this rate it's becoming increasingly easier to keep track of the companies that haven't licensed Unreal Engine 3. Good thing we have Wiki keeping count of the games using Epic's latest technology, although that list still doesn't include all the companies.

Looks like id Software's technology wasn't good enough for Activision. Either that or id's looking for a new publisher. Or... bah, I could go on forever with the speculation.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)