Last week, Pandemic Studios was shut down and absorbed by EA games. EA fired over 200 Pandemic employees, but kept 35 employees to work on the Saboteur. It was believed that EA kept these employees only to finish their current games in development, but the former Pandemic employees will be continuing one of their most popular franchises.
EA recently announced Mercs Inc, which is suppose to be the first Pandemic game developed at their new location in Playa Vista, California. Nick Earl, Senior VP and Group General Manager at EA had this to say:
“We are very excited to announce a new installment in the popular Mercenaries series because it demonstrates our continued commitment to Pandemic’s rich catalog of intellectual properties. From the studio at EALA, a core creative team is forging new ground and conceptualizing new ideas for this exciting franchise.”
This is great news for fans of the Mercenaries series. It is not know if Mercs Inc is the so called “Project X” that Pandemic mentioned on their website, or if they are entirely separate projects. It will be interesting to see exactly how much support EA has for the Pandemic catalog in the coming months.
[Source]
