AGE OF EMPIRES DEVS, METAL GEAR COMIC ARTIST PARTNER FOR IPHONE GAME WORLD WAR ROBOTS
In a frankly legitimately exciting announcement that seems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed, studio CEO Paul Bettner has written with news that Newtoy, the iPhone developer behind the cult hit free multiplayer game Chess with Friends, has teamed up with artist Ashley Wood, the illustrator behind the PSP’s Metal Gear Solid digital comic, to create a new game based on Wood’s graphic novel World War Robot.
Bettner and his brother David cut their teeth at Ensemble Studios, where they worked on games ranging from the original Age of Empires series to Halo Wars — the last game Ensemble produced before shuttering the studio — before going on to found Newtoy, where they’ve got a happily Offworld-ian sounding “new dream” charter to bring in outside talent not normally found in games to collaborate on new projects.
Newtoy hasn’t released many details of the World War Robot game quite yet, apart from a selection of Wood’s artwork and this synopsis:
In World War Robot, the human race is split by religion and politics as they wage a savage war between Earth and Mars. Giant robots augment the destruction with incredible battles, intense human/robot drama, a little black humor and some political intrigue thrown into the mix in this epic story.
Coming from a real-time strategy pedigree and creators of one of the most seamless online iPhone multiplayer experiences, though, hopes are high for something along the lines of a stylized portable Front Mission.
Volume one of World War Robot is currently available at Amazon (and rightfully already ordered), and Wood’s just published some previews of WWR2. Hong Kong vinyl toy producer 3A has also recently released these first images of apparently quite big (!) WWR figures (above), who want to roll up all our happiness and smoke it.
World War Robot home [Newtoy, Ashley Wood]
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