Tie-in media is becoming increasingly popular with video game launch preparation. From exploratory apps bringing us up to speed in the world of Alice: The Maddness Returns to developers encouraging their waiting masses to participate in the game’s creation through suggestion contests.
RAGE is going the way of its apocalyptic comrade, inFAMOUS, with a comic that will build us up and explain the world. One of the most difficult aspects of story telling is world-building without info-dumping.
Players won’t want to read an essay about why everything is as it is before they begin playing, but developers didn’t simply create a game, they created a world and a story in that world for you to play. With the launch of these supplemental materials we get to experience and explore more of that world than the game alone would have allowed.
Check out the following press release and pictures for details, the cover and sample pages.
Based on id Software’s upcoming first-person shooter RAGE, the three-issue comic book series is an original miniseries written by Arvid Nelson, the acclaimed creator of Rex Mundi, and penciled by Andrea Mutti (DMZ). The cover art was created by Glenn Fabry, best known for his work on Hellblazer and Preacher, the comic’s variant cover was created by Stephan Martiniere, the art director onRAGE. Set prior to the events in the game, the comics are an extension of the RAGE universe and provide insights into the game’s storyline.
This comic series, developed with the direct participation of RAGE’s creative director, Tim Willits, presents a new twist on the post-apocalyptic near future as one woman discovers that the survival of humankind doesn’t necessarily mean the survival of humanity. The Earth has been devastated by a collision with an asteroid, with a tiny fraction of the population surviving in life-sustaining Arks buried deep below its surface. Those who survive emerge to find a wasteland controlled by a global military dictatorship called the Authority. But a rescued scientist learns that the Authority has lied to her and the other survivors about how this new world came to be.
RAGE, the highly-anticipated game under development at id Software, is slated for release on October 4th, 2011 on the Xbox
360, PlayStation 3, and PC. For more information on RAGE visit www.RAGE.com.
