Crispy Gamer News

SCI FI and Trion World Network have hired two key industry veterans to help co-develop a connected video game and television show. Kevin Beardslee joins Trion to serve as Senior Development Director for the project at Trion’s San Diego development studio. Television writer Peter Egan has been tapped to write the pilot episode. 

Kevin Beardslee has over 15 years experience in game design, with over a decade spent developing MMO’s. Most notably, Kevin served as a key member of Blizzard Entertainment’s core development team for MMO World of Warcraft before founding Carbine Studios, a division of NCsoft North America, where he created and oversaw the development of an unannounced MMO. Working with Trion, Beardslee will act as the Senior Development Director for the co-developed SCI FI – Trion MMO video game. Peter Egan’s television experience includes Playmakers (ESPN) and Over There (FX Network). For NBC Entertainment, Peter served as a writer on several series including Medium and Medical Investigation. Egan also served as writer and story editor on the SCI FI series, The Dresden Files.

Trion and SCI FI hope to transcend the standard television and gaming experience by simultaneously co-developing a game and cable television property. The Trion – SCI FI partnership promises a synergy between entertainment mediums creating a “single rich, fictional universe of story telling.”

Apparently the Dead Space development team did a lot of research for its upcoming space thriller that consisted of watching hundreds of hours in DVDs that featured sci-fi and horror themes. Yeah, research - that’s the ticket.

So why should you care? Because they are giving away all one hundred DVDs as part of a special sweepstakes. The films include classics like Soylent Green and Dawn of the Dead to modern offerings like 12 Monkeys and 28 Days Later. A complete list can be found after the jump..

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Beta signup for NetDevil’s new Jumpgate MMO, Jumpgate Evolution, is now live. Players interested in this new chapter in the popular space MMO can sign up for a chance to play the game and help NetDevil stress test it prior to launch. Jumpgate is a space MMO that allows players to explore a massive universe, trade commodities for cold hard cash, take part in intergalactic raids, take on others in ship to ship combat, and shape your reputation as a hero or a pirate.

For more on the beta signup, check out the freshly launched Jumpgate portal at www.jumpgateevolution.com.

Bad news for MMO fans looking forward to Spacetime’’s upcoming space combat MMO, Blackstar. It looks like you”ll have to wait a good bit longer. Last week on the Spacetime Web site’’s Founder’’s Blog, the company announced that NCSoft has decided to cancel publication of the game.

According to the post, Regardless of how you look at it, we won’t be entering production in the immediate future, so we are retrenching and unfortunately had to let 12 folks go. There are always wild rumors at a time like this, so we wanted to be as specific as possible to the number and circumstance. All 12 employees released were given extended benefits, severance and will be supplied letters of recommendation.

Blackstar was Spacetime’’s primary focus, with the company apparently already finished with the game engine, infrastructure and rendering tools. The post states that the company is still committed to the property and, once freed up from obligations at both NCSoft and Spacetime, the property will be shopped around elsewhere to find a new publisher.