And the other revival of the morning: there was a lot of speculation in late 2007 and across 2008 as to what upstart studio Smith & Tinker (winners of one of my top 10 developer logos) were up to. Studio founder Jordan Weisman was the series creator of the original MechWarrior franchise at FASA, but had since moved on to found 42 Entertainment — creators of ARGs like Halo‘s now-renowned ‘ilovebees’ campaign.

The direction started to shape up a bit more when news hit that he’d reacquired a number of his early properties from Microsoft — MechWarrior and Shadowrun among them — but it wasn’t until today that the studio’s debut project was revealed: a current-gen reboot of MechWarrior, as seen in actually kind of unexpectedly wicked action above.

There’s currently no set publisher or release date, but Weisman gave IGN a number of good details as to what to expect from the game in an exhaustive interview, of note particularly for their ideas on a semi-persistent, Call of Duty 4-esque experience-based mode for its multiplayer.