Atari founder's Battleswarm enters MMOG fray

During the 2008 Game Developers Conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell confirmed for GameSpot that he was getting into the massively multiplayer online game market, but offered little insight into how. In an interview with USA Today this week, Bushnell revealed the first details of his upcoming MMOG Battleswarm: Field of Honor.

Described as a combination of real-time strategy and first-person shooter, Battleswarm is Bushnell's attempt to merge the kinds of games he enjoys with those his five sons (aged 16 to 30) play. A relative rarity, the MMO FPS genre has only a few members, including 2003's PlanetSide and the forthcoming Huxley: The Dystopia.

"In first-person shooter mode, you're a human soldier out to destroy alien bugs, while the commander view in the RTS mode lets you control your bugs, such as swarming, moving them around on the terrain to take on the humans," Bushnell said.

Battleswarm will be a free-to-play game fueled by microtransactions, where players can spend a couple of dollars (or less) to upgrade their characters' abilities with premium items. Bushnell said microtransaction players and those who play for free might be partially separated in order to keep the game balanced, but he added that skilled players won't necessarily need to upgrade.

The game is currently being developed by Reality Gap, a Seattle-based outfit cofounded by Bushnell. When it launches, it will use MetaTIX, a virtual currency created by the Reality Gap founders that will work across games. Currently, it is only used by a single title, Reality Gap's free-to-play Monato Esprit, which launched earlier this month.

In the 1970s, Bushnell staked his claim to the title "father of the video game industry," founding Atari, producing the first arcade games Pong and Computer Space, and establishing gaming as a billion-dollar business. Since that time, he has been a serial entrepreneur, founding gaming-related restaurant chains, such as Chuck E. Cheese and uWink, and serving as chairman of the board for casual-gaming ad firm NeoEdge. Paramount Pictures is currently developing a feature film on the early days of Atari and has cast Leonardo DiCaprio to play the part of Bushnell.