Take-Two picks up Irrational Games
Posted by inpheaux on January 9th, 2006 at 6:08 pmQuick little industry news tidbit today: Gamasutra is reporting that Take Two [publisher of a bajillion different series, including stuff from Rockstar] has acquired Irrational Games [developer of such epic games as System Shock 2]. This kind of acquisition isn't completely unheard of, seeing as just last November Take Two made a similar acquisition of Civ-Developers Firaxis Games.
Also confirmed in this set of press releases / leaked memos / e-mails / etc is the latest target releasedate of BioShock, Irrational's spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Currently they're shooting for the rather broad target of "2007". A lot of people have high hopes for BioShock, myself included, and it looks like we'll all just be waiting at least another year before seeing it. Oh well. We're still getting Spore and two new consoles this year. I think we'll live.
In other news, everyone's favourite monolithic publisher/developer of doom, Electronic Arts just renewed their trademark on "System Shock". Bastards. Others have reported that this could be a sign that EA is secretly working on a super-secret magical sequel, which would be System Shock 3, but I totally don't buy it. They just renewed their trademark to keep the series under their control, not as a sign that they plan on doing anything with it, just that they don't want anyone else doing stuff with it. But that's why we have BioShock.
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