With today’s launch of the official Warbird Games website, we are also proud to announce our first title Jack Houston and the Necronauts!

Jack Houston concepts by Patrick Reilly

Inspired by classic graphic adventure games, Jack Houston will feature a familiar point-and-click interface, cell animation style characters, painted backgrounds, and actor recorded dialogue.

Lead designer Stacy Davidson said “I grew up playing Infocom adventures, and later the Sierra classics like Space Quest, King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, etc. These kinds of games used to come out every month, but they’ve been relatively extinct for a long time now with the exception of a few indies out there trying to keep them alive. I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one out there wishing the genre would resurge, and I’m putting my money where my mouth is with Jack Houston. I wanted to do an adventure game that looks amazing, with a really cool main character, something really kick ass like Full Throttle back in it’s day, only I wanted to do something in a space fantasy, Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers style nineteen-thirties serials and comics sort of setting. Something really out there. Jack is the culmination of a lot of brainstorming with my friend and collaborator Mike Oliver. We’re just space nuts, like Star Wars came out when we were little kids in nineteen-seventy-seven and we’ve just been ga-ga over anything with ray guns ever since.”

Alien creature concept by Patrick Reilly

The plot follows a basic pulp sci-fi novel line at first, then takes an abrupt turn toward a more fantastic, comicbook realm.

Stacy Davidson added “I wanted to do something a little different, a little wacky. As we start off, we’re rapidly approaching the year two-thousand, but we’re in a sort of alternate reality, the so-called future as it was imagined by mid-century artists and writers. In Jack’s world, the sky is full of space stations and we’ve colonized the moon, so the next big step is locating another world with life and making first contact. That’s where Jack Houston comes in. He’s a test pilot, and he has a very special job ahead of him, he’s been called upon to pilot Earth’s first interstellar spacecraft in an attempt to reach an alien world which may be inhabited by intelligent life.”

Starship concept by Mike Oliver

This is where things get bumpy for Jack Houston. On the maiden voyage of his experimental starship from the Venture Air and Space Transportation company, something goes disastrously wrong and Captain Houston finds himself in a desperate situation his training never prepared him for.

“It’s about a guy,” continued Davidson, “who’s basically an old fashioned, twentieth-century kind of guy. He used to test out jets in the desert, and now these crazy scientists are plopping him in their newfangled space rockets. Once he plunges down that rabbit hole, there’s no going back, and this interstellar voyage turns out to be way more than he ever bargained for. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say Jack lands up to his eyeballs in trouble, and ends up in a very unfamiliar environment. It’s not the mission he signed up for, and it will surely be the basis for many continued adventures with ol’ Jack to come.”

Alien creature concept by Mitchell Malloy

Davidson is currently working with writer and artist Mike Oliver on the game’s design, as concept artists Patrick Reilly, Mitchell Malloy and Giacomo Tappainer work to achieve the right look for Jack Houston’s classic sci-fi universe.

“It’s tough to say when we’ll be at a playable stage,” concluded Davidson, “we’re still designing the world and writing the story. But I can tell you to keep your eye on this site because next week we’ll be posting a little video teaser. In the coming weeks we’ll also be posting interviews on the Warbird site with the artists. I think we have something really special here that any fan of classic sci-fi, as well as any fan of graphic adventures, should really dig. I actually can’t wait to play it myself.”

Hello world!

Stacy Davidson here.  You may know me as the creator of the ongoing Han Solo Adventures fan game project, which actually began as a part of the Star Wars Uncut project… but I digress.

I am actually a filmmaker with longtime ties to game development, having worked for Origin Systems, Inc, and on my own indie titles like Shadow of the Lost Citadel.

On August 27, 2009 I launched the Han Solo Adventures site with a 15 second video and a few screenshots.  What followed was nothing less than an avalanche of hits and email from all over the world, mostly praising my love for the old LucasArts SCUMM adventure games and lamenting the sudden demise of the genre back in the late ’90s.  What began for me as a stroll down memory lane and an opportunity to have fun inside the Star Wars universe has become a full blown obsession with doing my part to resurrect graphic adventure games!

I now have outlines for three original adventure games series, and I’ve begun the journey with my homage to sci-fi serials and comics in Jack Houston and the Necronauts.  The setting is a Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers inspired universe of high adventure in the stars.

In addition, we also have a couple of action/adventure style games in the design process.  Without giving away too much, I’ll just say fellow Ray Harryhausen fans should love what we have in store!

Thanks for stopping in, and please subscribe to our RSS or add us on Twitter to keep up with our developing titles!

-Stacy Davidson