Empire Shooter From The Makers Of Advent Rising

Leaving behind the GlyphX studio and their 2005 debut title, Advent Rising, part of the game's development team formed a new studio last year, and are now gearing up for their first project, code named "Empire". The game is to be a first-person shooter based on Epic's Unreal 3 Engine, and will be set in the near future during a second American Civil War. The new team is known as Chair Entertainment, and they are once again working closely with Orson Scott Card - the science fiction author who has been a prolific novelist for nearly thirty years.

Not only will Orson Scott Card have a large hand in developing the storyline for the game, but he also chose to write an "Empire" novel based on Chair's ideas for this disturbing possible future (can America's future - or present - be anything but disturbing?). Scheduled for release this November, the novel offers a powerful introduction to the Empire universe, created by Chair Entertainment to include a future next-generation video game, comic book series, and feature film. Here's a bit about the scenario behind Empire:

"The American Empire has grown too fast, and the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point. The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone.

The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side, and militia foot-soldiers on the other, devastating the cities, and overrunning the countryside. But the vast majority, who only want the killing to stop and the nation to return to more peaceful days, have technology, weapons and strategic geniuses of their own.

When the American dream shatters into violence, who can hold the people and the government together? And which side will you be on?"

Currently the development team is shopping the Empire game around to various publishers, so there is no word yet on a release date.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)