Video Games
2012 News: After years of the Heavy Gear franchise laying dormant a licensing deal was announced on August 1st, 2012 between Stompy Bot Productions and the owner of the franchise Dream Pod 9. The press release indicates a new PC, console, and mobile game will be produced.
Faced with the loss of the Battletech/MechWarrior property, Activision's Production Executive, Frank Evers (NYPH), spearheaded the acquisition of the video game license in 1995. The story of the first game, Heavy Gear, followed the crew of the CNCS landship (an enormous hovercraft carrier), 'Vigilance' as they played a cat-and-mouse game across the Badlands with a rival landship from the AST, the 'Draco'. The game was made for the Windows 95 operating system and was partly based on a game engine derived from existing MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries code.
In the second game, Heavy Gear 2, an atrocity caused by the New Earth Concordat (NEC) — the destruction of the Badlands city of Peace River by an anti-matter bomb — leads to a formal cease-fire between the Northern and Southern Leagues. A team of elite Special-Ops pilots from across the planet, equipped with advanced prototype Gears and a newly unveiled intersystem assault shuttle, are sent through the interstellar Tannhauser gate to the planet Caprice, the nearest NEC base, to find out more and strike back at the enemy. The game was made for the Windows 98 operating system, though a Linux version was also released later on by Loki Software. Unlike the previous title, it used an entirely new game system, which was also used in Interstate '82. It was well received by critics, with an 81.46% average rating on gamerankings.com and being considered the best game of the genre at the time by GameSpot.
An online demo version of Heavy Gear 2 was available some months before the official demo and was a success in the Mechwarrior community.
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Famous quotes related to video games:
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
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—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)