The Big Blue is an Underwater Game by the Ecco The Dolphin Team set 1 million years into the future. This is a Kickstarter campaign looking to raise $665,000 to complete the game. If the team reaches its stretch goals, they will add multiplayer cooperative play, make the game an MMO, and seek to bring the game to console platforms including the Ouya. The Big Blue Kickstarter campaign ends on April 29, 2013.
Perhaps best known as the creator of the Ecco the Dolphin series, Annunziata is once again collaborating with key members of the original Ecco team, programmerLaszlo Szenttornyai and composer Spencer Nilsen, to create a bigger, better undersea game that takes advantage of the multiple advancements of today’s popular platforms.
“I’ve been thinking about this game for two decades,” said Annunziata, president and ceo of Playchemy. “20 years ago when we made the first Ecco the Dolphin, we were young; the available (16-bit) technology was relatively primitive. We’re older now, and have the vision, energy and technical horsepower to create an evolutionary, revolutionary underwater adventure game; to make it the game we always envisioned, teaming with creatures and really ‘alive’.”
Set 1 million years in the future, following the extinction of humans, the game’s backstory is rooted in the Gaia theory that the Earth is a giant, interconnected living organism. The Big Blue deals with themes of climate change, mass extinction, evolution and biogenesis as the mass cetacean population – dolphin, porpoise and whales, rise to power and are able to ‘sing’ new creatures into being with their ‘life songs’. Everything in the game will be reactive and controllable, lending The Big Blue a hyper-realistic feeling and resulting in a world that is immense, beautiful and terrifying.
Blimey this sounds pretty good, although I never got that far into Ecco The Dolphin, it was really hard! I do remember it stood out as an incredibly different interesting title for the time. I considering getting an Ouya, so if it does get released there then I will be even more likely to buy one.
