Wondering what's going on with Six Days in Fallujah, the controversy-plagued Iraq-war title from Atomic Games? Publisher Konami backed out in April 2009, and after the developer slashed staff in August of last year, the project seemed pretty much over.
It's not. Earlier this month, IGN cited an unnamed source claiming the game was finished and coming out. That wasn't quite accurate -- the game isn't finished, but Atomic does hope to bring it to retail eventually.
In a recent talk with Atomic President (and former Bungie Exec VP) Peter Tamte about the company's upcoming XBLA/PC game Breach, we got a status update on Fallujah....
Peter Tamte: Your question was about Fallujah?
Bitmob: Yeah....
PT: Uhhhh yeah, I mean, our...what's your question? [Laughs.] There are so many!
Bitmob: Well, is it laid to rest forever?
PT: No, no! Our plan is to bring Fallujah out. We've made some progress on it after Konami pulled out. We're focused on Breach right now, but...we took the Six Days in Fallujah technology as the base for the Breach engine, and we enhanced that somewhat. Now we need to take Six Days in Fallujah and bring the Fallujah engine up to speed with Breach. There's work that needs to be done on it, but we're gonna do that.
Bitmob: So you guys are actively looking for a publisher?
PT: Yes, that is correct.
Bitmob: I read in another interview that the game arose because members of the military came to you with the idea?
PT: Yeah, that's right. We started working with the Marine Corps back in 2003, and some of the groups that the Marine Corps assigned to work with us, one of the units was the 3/1 out of Camp Pendleton. Those guys ended up being one of the two battalions that was right at the center of the movement in Fallujah.
We actually had close relationships with a lot of those guys, spent a lot of time with them through the training process. One of them, Eddie Garcia, Sgt. Garcia, actually got medevaced out of Fallujah and was in Germany in the hospital for a long time. Within a week after he flew back home, he called me up and said, "Peter, here's the deal. This is what just happened in Fallujah and I don't see any of this in the newspapers, etc. But I don't care, because my generation plays video games. So this is how we'd like the story to be documented."
And I said, how do other Marines feel about that? He said, "I'll have them tell you." I talked with a ton of them. They all felt very strongly about us doing that, and they trusted us because of the relationship that we had built, that we'll be fair to them and honest. So you bet we're gonna bring that out.
