The official Kickstarter is now live at http://warzonegame.com/, check it out, even a pledge of £1 gets you the .pd of the rules and £19 and up gets you the awesome looking new miniatures! I'm really excited about this now the Kickstarter is live, the problem is, I can't decide which pledge level to go with.....if only I had £333 to splash on this!
Back in the mid 90's, my roleplaying group and I found a book in the local games store called 'Mutant Chronicles'. It was a dark, bleak game, set in the Earth's far future, where the human race had leached the planet earth of all resources of any worth, and then gone forth, spreading out and colonising the solar system.
Nations as we know them were long gone, in their place there were instead a number of Mega-corprations, each with its own specialisation, and cultural heritage; Mishima (Japanese/Oriental), Bauhaus (Germanic/Slavic), Capitol (American), Imperial (British/French) and the elusive Cybertronic, a new corporation with highly advanced cybernetic technology and somewhat dubious ways of obtaining their operatives. Conflict was rife, espionage and even open combat were commonplace between these corporations, but they had a greater battle to fight.
Warzone - 1995
After most of the solar system was colonised, explorers disturbed a mysterious artifact on an until then unknown tenth planet beyond Pluto. It turned out that this 'Seal' (the First seal of Repulsion) had been protecting the Solar system from an ancient evil, the Dark legion; a horde of other-dimensional mutants and undead, headed by five 'Dark Apostles'. With the seal broken, the Dark Legion flooded into our dimension, and aided by the zealots of 'The Brotherhood' (A religious organisation formed to battle the Dark legion, and unify the corporations), humanity began the fight for its very survival...
Doom Troopers (Genesis/SNES) - 1995
The roleplaying game was fantastic, it had a decent set of mechanics, and an intricate and well thought out backstory. There were a number of excellent sourcebooks available for it and it it did well, leading to a spin-off wargame called 'Warzone' (which itself had several expansion books and a number of stand-alone boardgame type additions), and a collectible card game, Doom Trooper (Which in turn had its own Console game spin off!). Both systems and the CCG were very popular from what I gather, the miniatures were good quality sculpts, and just about every different unit type in the roleplaying and wargame was produced as a miniature (Mostly infantry, but some of the smaller vehicles and some of the gargantuan monsters were produced as multi-part, high quality resin and metal models).
Doom Trooper CCG - 1994
In the end, Target Games, the Swedish company that produced the games failed due to its parent company's bankruptcy, but the story and the games remained popular, if unsupported. Interest in the licence/background has always been there and in recent years we've seen a (admittedly short-lived) collectible miniatures game from Fantasy Flight games, and even in 2008, a big budget movie starring Thomas Jane and Ron Perlman, that was released in cinemas (and was fairly good in my opinion).
All this reminiscing aside, when i was recently cruising the boards over at Dakka Dakka, I read that the current licence holder, Paradox Entertainment, is releasing a new version of the miniature wargame, Warzone! It is being released on February 15th, and there's been a couple of images of the models floated so far, and they look GOOD! Personally, i'm very excited about this, and i'm impressed a company has picked this up and produced the game without going to crowdfunding, which seems to be the popular route nowadays.
If you've played any of the games listed above, i'm sure this news will excite you as well, if you haven't, then I will tentatively say, take a look at this game. If it is pulled off well it will certainly be worth your time. Mutant Chronicles/Warzone is so under-appreciated in my opinion. it has such a solid, interesting story to it, and the Warzone rules system was robust as well. This has the potential to be such a good game, and all the things i've heard so far have been positive. I can't wait.....but to bide you over, below is the official trailer.
