38 Studios, formerly known as Green Monster Games and founded by seasoned Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling, just announced that it inked a deal with Epic Games to employ its Unreal Engine 3 in the development of 38 Studios' upcoming MMORPG which is in pre-production stage.
It's been a while since we last heard of 38 Studios' first project, codenamed Copernicus, and it's expected to go online in late 2010. The company's President and CEO, Brett Close, believes that the use of Unreal Engine 3 together with its recently licensed BigWorld server-side technology will help deliver the highest quality 38 Studios is aiming for.
Through press wire, Close stated:
38 Studios is uniquely positioned to deliver an unparalleled Online Entertainment Experience. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is best-of-breed, empowering developers with superior content creation tools, extensive middleware integration, and exceptional visual quality and rendering.
Epic gets what it takes to make great games, and its Unreal Engine 3 toolset will allow our development team to prototype efficiently and achieve the signature visual quality and excellence we are striving for.
Work on Copernicus began because Cult Schilling was a fan of EverQuest and EverQuest 2, and his goal to make something of the same calibre leaves us with high hopes for this 2010 title. The roster of this MMORPG's development team include Todd McFarlane as art director and author and R.A. Salvatore as creative director. Former Gamespot host Rich Gallup also signed up recently to help create the game.
