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News

  Report: Maxis Co-Founder Reveals Oddworld Return
by Brandon Boyer
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May 22, 2008
 
Report: Maxis Co-Founder Reveals  Oddworld  Return
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At a talk given to students of Waterloo, Ontario's Wilfrid Laurier University, industry vet and Maxis co-founder Jeff Braun has announced his involvement with a new game from Oddworld Inhabitant's long standing Oddworld franchise.

According to Wilfrid Laurier student newspaper The Cord, Braun told the audience the game would feature a "revolutionary new 3-D animation system" that would feature "cinematic quality on a '1 to 1 scale' to that of computer-generated motion pictures," and would utilize the same assets as a CG film version.

No further details were reported on the game or any potential film or television versions, apart from the fact that the Oddworld title could be delivered in episodic format.

In 2005, Oddworld president Lorne Lanning announced that the company was ceasing operation on internal game development, instead working on creating and fostering cross-media intellectual properties between films and games.

Lanning announced the first such game at the GameCity festival in late 2006 with the "politically edgy sci-fi action thriller" Citizen Siege, a game to be developed side by side with a film version produced by Shrek producer John Williams.

At the time, Lanning revealed the same plans to utilize identical art assets for both media. Since the initial reveal, few further details have emerged about the status of the property.
 
   
 
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Art and Design
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congrats guys!

Anonymous
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While few in the industry that know Oddworlds ability to produce some of the best graphics around, likewise Lorne’s gift for coming up with some wacky concepts. Its will be interesting to see they can overcome the curse that closed Oddworld in-house game production doors in the first place, that being their inability to follow-up great graphics and a great concepts with equally great game play. The original Abes Oddysee and later Stranger, the final product out of Oddworld were to date the highlights of the studio, but with schedules delays, cost overruns and burning bridges with some key publishers, such as Sony and Microsoft didn’t help the studios.

Kale Menges
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I just hope that this "1 to 1 scale" thing isn't similar to Sega's promise with the Dreamcast about "Toy Story" quality graphics...Don't get me wrong, the Dreamcast was beautiful and our current hardware in this generation is quite powerful (if you know what you're doing), but this is a bold statement and rather brash promise from someone we've not really heard from for a couple of years. Power to Oddworld, though, and I hope they can pull it off. They've made incredible things in the past and I know they have the artistic talent.

Anonymous
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Sega never made claims about the Dreamcast having "Toy Story" quality graphics. Sony made those claims about the PS2.


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