OFF THE WIRE
William Usher
cinemablend.com
Kurt Sutter, creator, writer and producer on the hit show about an outlaw biker gang, Sons of Anarchy, briefly tweeted about negotiations for an upcoming Sons of Anarchy game. Usually, this sort of stuff is kept hidden until whatever publisher picks up the rights is ready to announce the game.
The info comes courtesy of a tweet that Sutter let loose on the interwebz, the number one place to go for attention grabbing news, and he had this to tweet..."soon to be taking meetings about an SOA game. have a major gaming company interested. trying to figure out costs, platform and timing."
Timing being the key word there and don't be surprised if the tweet ends being deleted soon. Most pubs don't want this kind of news spilled because it's usually attached to quarterly earnings. Planning the timing of an announcement for a large project can easily boost a company's portfolio for the fiscal year...assuming the announcement garners the kind of heat many shareholders are looking for. Remember what happened when GameBlog, that French website, spilled the beans about Amazon's goof regarding Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? Yeah, exactly. Timing is everything.
Nevertheless, Sutter's tweet is vague enough to only hint at negotiations and it's completely possible that if it all falls through there's no harm and no foul. If however, negotiations do go through, well the gaming universe will already be well aware of a Sons of Anarchy game. With that being said, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's going to be a little like a smaller version of GTA IV's The Lost and Damned DLC fused with a little bit of Full Throttle, with some shooting, a little fighting and maybe some road-based combat just for the heck of it.
I'd also imagine a retail release would be pretty risky so I'm betting THQ -- with their renewed focus on core gaming -- might pick up the license and publish it on Steam, SEN and XBLA for a 2013 release to possibly coincide with season seven of the FX TV show.
Anyways, that's all just speculation. What are you thoughts on this and what kind of game do you think Sons of Anarchy might turn out to be, if it even gets made?
Update: Sutter followed up the previous tweet with another one saying, "to do a quality platform-based game costs tens of millions and takes years. we're toying with the idea of a high-end browser-based game."
Sutter, if you read this ask the pubs about UDK or Unity! You can get your game made for cheap and make it look like Gears of War...just don't give in to a Zynga-quality product, Sons of Anarchy deserves better!