Category Archives: Red Mile

Looking forward to Red Mile’s Sin City? Hope you’ve got a telescope. The company’s latest financial statement puts the game in “fiscal 2012″.

That’s if you’re lucky. The firm’s “currently in the process of negotiating revisions to the license agreement.”

Better, Red Mile hasn’t got enough money to carry on development. The game will only ship “if we can raise sufficient funds to continue operations.”

Amazing. Thanks, Destructoid.

Canadian publisher SilverBirch has bought Sin City publisher Red Mile, the company’s announced.

The buyout’s a complete affair: 100 percent of Red Mile’s stock has changed hands.

“SilverBirch’s strategy to grow through strategic acquisitions is a vision that Red Mile shares and one that we can contribute to in a meaningful way to position the combined entity as a leading integrated video game publisher,” said Red Mile boss Chester Aldridge.

“By combining Red Mile’s development, publishing and licensing strengths with SilverBirch’s proven ability to operate and grow its business, we expect to deliver strong growth for the company in the years ahead.”

Press release after the link.

More »

According to this Gamespot report, Sin City is no longer being developed by Transmission Games, but will still release next year.

The information came out of a co-publishing announcement between Red Mile and Atari yesterday.

Red Mile said that the switch had been made “quite a long time ago,” but has refused thus far to name the new developer.

Speaking here, Red Mile president Glenn Wong has revealed that the Sin City game is to be based on Frank Miller graphic novels, as opposed to the movie. Believe us when we say this is “very good news”.

“It’s just one of those calls you have to make in the games industry,” he said. “We decided that the ‘Sin City’ graphic novels, with their dark images and nonlinear stories, would work better as the basis for an interactive game. We don’t have to track the linear movie screenplay and try to translate it into a game; we prefer to create an original story based on the characters from the books which, we think, will make for a longer, deeper video game experience.”

According to that article the game is six months into production at at Melbourne, Australia-based developer Transmission Games (formerly IR Gurus). Their game is Unreal Engine-based and is being built for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii.

“All I can say is that it will be heavily story- and character-driven, with multiple crossing story lines, and it will contain the same kind of violence, the same kind of sexiness, the same kind of edginess that are the hallmark of the graphic novels,” said writer and designer Flint Dille. “There will be a wide variety of things for the gamer to do, from fighting to shooting to driving. We’re trying to deliver it all in a very stylized, very bold, very surprising way. What makes this so dangerous a project is that, quite frankly, the source material is so damn good. It sets a very high bar for us to hit.”

Wong added: “We’d like to finish game No. 1 in a year and a half, and then turn out a sequel every other year after that. The beauty of Frank Miller’s work is that it’s so rich with so many characters that, once a gamer gets a real good taste of ‘Sin City,’ they’re not going to say, ‘OK, I’ve seen it all.’ They’re going to say, ‘So when do I get more?’”

Consider yourself told. And if you haven’t read the original graphic novels, you seriously need to sort it out. Some of the most gratifying comics on paper.

Big up the little guy. Plucky contender Red Mile has announced its fourth quarter financials, showing revenue of $5.7 million for the quarter ending December 31, an increase of 78 percent from $3.2 million in the previous quarter, and an increase of 1,033 percent from $503,000 in the same quarter a year ago. That’s some percent.

Net loss for Q4 was $2.8 million, a decrease of 71 percent from the previous quarter loss of $9.5 million and a 17 percent increase from a $2.4 million loss in the same quarter a year ago.

There was no game-related stuff in the release, but the company’s big “thing” is Sin City, of which there’s currently no release date.

Jeff Braun, the other Sims creator, has joined Red Mile as a strategic advisor. He said his ears pricked up about the company when it inked the deal to publish Sin City.

“Red Mile got my attention when it licensed Frank Miller’s Sin City,” he said. “The opportunity to work with a company that has the rights to such an influential Frank Miller property is very compelling. The next big challenge for Red Mile will be to turn this property into a triple-A game and make the transition to a top-tier publisher. I believe their development strategy, in addition to the management experience of Glenn Wong [ex-head of EA Canada - Ed], are key steps toward achieving this goal.”

Braun’s been around for almost 20 years. His career began when he co-founded Maxis with Will Wright in 1987.