Sorry guys. We've had an incredibly busy week. We are currently 4 people doing 20 people's work.
I was planning to get our blog up and running during the week so I could write about the MS situation there, but since I didn't, I'll give you a quick lowdown here.
TL;DR: Brimstone sold the rights to the "Eden Falls" name to Microsoft and is not currently involved with any MS or Lift London projects. We ARE still working on a really cool tactical sci-fi RPG, though.
And then some history: This whole situation has its roots all the back in 2008, when I decided to recruit a team of hobbyists to work on an Unreal Tournament 3 mod. After a lot of head scratching and nail biting, I ended up calling the project "Eden Falls". I thought it had a nice ring to it, and it fit well into what I had in mind for the game. Sadly, after several months of working on EF in my spare time, it became evident that the project was going nowhere. The game was promptly driven to the ground, along with the site and domain I had registered for it (edenfalls.org). Fast forward to 2013. Four years and two children later, I decided the time to fulfill my life-long dream of running my very own game studio had come. I teamed up with my buddy Rafu and Brimstone was born. We already knew that we wanted to make a kickass sci-fi RPG that you could play anywhere - be it on a plane or on a toilet. We put our heads down and got to work. The pre-production was going very well and we knew we'd soon need a proper name for our game. It was universally agreed that the working title "CyberNoir" was just not going to cut it. I quickly suggested we use my old project's name, since I already had a typographical logo ready for it and all. The name "Eden Falls" was promptly adopted and a domain for our newly christened game registered (edenfallsgame.com).
A couple of months later (December 2013) I was approached via email by a lawyer from Microsoft, saying he wanted to talk to me about my game. I was mortified, but curious. Was I getting sued by a giant corporation? After a few emails back and forth, it turned out that Lift London (an MS studio) was also working on a project called "Eden Falls" and that they would be interested in acquiring the rights to the name for a reasonable sum of money. A couple of weeks of hard negotiation later, Brimstone transferred the rights to Microsoft.
And about the rumors circulating out there: All we know is that Lift London is working on something called "Eden Falls". What kind of a game is it? We don't know. Is it somehow connected to Lionhead's canceled project? No idea. Personally, I kind of hope it is. I guess we'll learn, come June 10th and E3. I'll be watching the live streams with you.
Phew. That ended up not being so brief after all. Oh well. If I left something unmentioned or vague, feel free to ask me here on the comments or via email (samuli@brimstoneinteractive.com). Cheers!
