Housemarque (Super Stardust, Dead Nation) has had an interesting 2013 so far, with the company revealing in January that they were “quietly working on a few new projects,” then concept art for Dead Nation 2 surfaced in February, prompting them to issue a statement that said “no Housemarque title has been cancelled in years.”
Clearly wanting to address all of the questions out there, Housemarque posted some answers on their blog, reminding us that one of their in development titles is for iOS, with the other being a “a spiritual successor to Super Stardust,” though platforms for that specific one haven’t been narrowed down yet.
Taking a closer look at the ‘spiritual successor to Super Stardust’, if all goes according to plan, the “unveiling should be very close.” And they continued by saying that “there are reasons why we don’t call it ‘direct sequel’, I guess all will be clear as soon as we release some footage.”
As for that third title, the studio said “nothing has been revealed about the third title. Why? Because we are not allowed to speak about it yet. There are business reasons involved, and we are gonna stick to them.” The theorist in me thinks that this game might be on PS4, with Sony wanting to hold back details until later, so when Housemarque was asked if this project was on PS4, they simply referred to their CEO’s thoughts on the new system from February:
It was great to hear how focused Sony was on games during the PlayStation 4 announcement. The new console sounds really developer friendly, and we believe that this time the console transition is much easier for many developers as you’re probably able to use a lot of your existing technology and tools instead of writing everything from the scratch.
Having 16 times more memory than PlayStation 3 is also very helpful, and the extra horsepower the machine has can be used for creating new kinds of gameplay experiences that weren’t possible during the previous generation. We’re certainly looking forward to creating awesome challenges for the PlayStation 4 in the future.
Finally, on the prospect of seeing a PlayStation Vita port of Dead Nation, they didn’t give out the greatest news:
Housemarque is constantly experimenting with PSVita, however our staff is 100% focused on new games and even if we had resources a DN port is less trivial than it looks (there are technical issues we can’t discuss in detail). We are not writing it off, but don’t hold your breath for it.
We’ll be sure to let you know when details for that spiritual successor are released.
What do you think Housemarque is doing with the Super Stardust franchise? Are you disappointed a PS Vita version of Dead Nation isn’t in the works right now? Let us know in the comments below.
