A day after fans learned about ShapeShifter Games, InXile revealed that they have partnered with the studio.
In a blog post on their site, InXile shared this statement:
“We’re happy to announce that the newly formed Shapeshifter Games—formed of ex-Volition developers—is working with us to help bring Clockwork Revolution to life.
Shortly after Volition closed, we flew to Illinois and worked with Xbox and the then ex-Volition leadership to secure this new team as our co-development partner. Their wealth of industry experience further bolstering our efforts in developing our upcoming steampunk RPG Clockwork Revolution.”
InXile then went on to explain that there were connections between Volition and the people in InXile. Younger gamers won’t remember, but years before Saints Row and even Red Faction, Volition was originally known as Parallax Software.
In this capacity, Parallax developed the first two Descent Games. InXile studio head Brian Fargo, and their president, Chris Keenan, were both working in InXile’s predecessor at the time, Interplay. Keenan remembers Descent as the first game he worked on as a game tester, and Fargo himself published these games.
What is interesting in this revelation is that InXile, and subsequently Microsoft Game Studios, may have known or anticipated that Volition Software was set to close. If this was the case, one wonders why they didn’t decide to acquire Volition or volunteer to take in their employees.
Now, we will acknowledge here that Microsoft recently laid off 1,900 employees across their game studios, so they company may have also had that in mind when they saw this playing out.
If this is a situation where they didn’t know any of this was happening at all, it was providence for ShapeShifter that InXile reached out to them with Microsoft’s say so.
Now, we had reported that ShapeShifter was working on an Xbox Game Studios project yesterday. It seems highly likely that this game was Clockwork Revolution after all. We won’t rule out the possibility that ShapeShifter is working on two titles, but it really seems unlikely since the studio is newly formed.
InXile unveiled Clockwork Revolution just last year, and they didn’t tell us when they started development on this project. So we don’t know if ShapeShifter will be coming in to help shape the game up from the onset, or if they are functioning as essentially a support studio to finish the project.
It would certainly be interesting if ShapeShifter’s involvement will tweak Clockwork Revolution even further, as it would be great to see it as something more than a BioShock-like game.
