Last December, we reported that author John Scalzi was working with Industrial Toys on a first-person space shooter game called Morning Star, an original game designed to be playable on multiple mobile platforms. As Scalzi pointed out, “It’s not a port from another video game medium, in other words: It’s at home in mobile.” Now news has come from Scalzi of Morning Star Alpha, a tie-in graphic novel set in the same universe, written by the author and illustrated by Mike Choi.
Check out how the two projects will interact and what sort of vibe influenced the world of Morning Star.
Over on his blog, Scalzi is quick to point out you don’t need to play the game to be into the graphic novel and vice versa. “…each is complementary to the other. Basically, the more you explore the whole Morning Star universe, the richer and more exciting it all becomes.”
The comic will include some interactivity in regards to allowing you to choose specific story paths. Choose wisely! The direction you take through the graphic novel will influence the course of the game itself.
2013 seems to be the year to check out John Scalzi’s contributions to sci-fi and space opera, starting with The Human Division, the episodic serial sequel to Old Man’s War launched at the beginning of the year, and continuing with Morning Star. When we asked John about which (if any) existing space opera worlds inspired the universe of Morning Star, he had this to say:
“It’s interesting, actually. The game is a first-person shooter, so I think people are going to see echos of some of the universes in that genre, going back to Quake Two, Half-Life, System Shock and Halo (the last not surprising, since Industrial Toys was co-founded by Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian), and away from video games I think visually and thematically there are some similarities to 2001—not usually the influence one thinks of with a first-person shooter, but when folks play the game they might get the reference.
That said, one of the things we wanted to do with the Morning Star universe is not bow too heavily in the direction of any particular influence. Both Morning Star and Morning Star Alpha are designed to be native to tablets and the mobile sphere, and that ”ground up” ethos applied to building the world as well. We wanted to create a recognizable and logical future from where we are now, which owes a debt to the real world as much more than any fictional antecedent.
So we looked at what it would take to get us into space from where we are now, what the ramifications of that would be, and modeled both the characters and technology from that. So while anyone who looks will see echoes of previous space stories from literature, cinema and games in Morning Star, we feel pretty good about how we’ve also built up something people haven’t quite seen before.”
More news on Morning Star and Morning Star Alpha as we get it!
Stubby the Rocket is the mascot of Tor.com. Stubby constantly finds graphic novel readers influencing its course of action.
