Auran

Magnetar Games has brought back Auran's popular 1997 RTS game, Dark Reign: The Future of War. The Canadian based developer made a deal to remake the game with publishing giant, Activision, and has made an accurate remake for the Xbox Live. It seems they did encounter a small hitch with bringing it to the Xbox Live Marketplace, but it looks to be all sorted out now...

Create and operate the rail world of your dreams. Build routes, drive locos, issue Driver Commands, download content and much more.

Auran Games, developer of the long running Trainz franchise, today announced that Beta Testing had commenced for the new Trainz Simulator 2009: World Builder Edition (TS2009). Over 1,000 registered members from TrainzDev.com have been invited to join the initial testing group and more testers would be invited in the coming weeks.

Kotaku AU reports that the time of Auran's Fury is coming to an end. A post on the Fury forum by Tony "Bossman" Hilliam laments that the Fury game servers and website will be up for only another 48 hours, after all attempts to keep the game afloat failed. From the forum...

You've got to hand it to Tony Hilliam. He's damn resilient. If everyone had to go through what the Auran CEO did late last year, I'm sure most would have decided to move on from the games industry, but not Tony. AustralianGamer has returned to the slimmer Auran offices to conduct an interview with Tony on the new direction and game design that Fury has morphed to. After all the fiasco of the Auran lay-off's of last year, Tony comes off as determined and optimistic as ever, and if there's any hope of a resurrection of the once mighty Auran, that's certainly the traits needed.

It's not really new news for anyone who's been keeping tabs on the Auran situation, but an article at The Courier Mail re-iterates that Auran is indeed alive and still developing games. Although the studio has been scaled back from 85 employees to just 15, it has secured a contract for a game and plans to sell off Fury technology to Chinese developers. Auran co-founder, Graham Edelsten, had this to say to The Courier Mail...

We've had various insights into where Auran went wrong last year, from Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam, and Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter, as well as various comments on Sumea, and now Doolwind has added his thoughts at his blog.

Tony Albrecht, console games programmer, inventor of the Tony Unit, knows all about getting the shaft. And I don't mean that in a rude way. You see, he used to work at Rat Bag Games for six years, right up until Midway infamously closed the studio down just before Christmas 2005. He knows the low-down.

Tony shares his valuable advice for all you ex-Auran peeps now that you're going through what he and many of his colleagues had to endure just two years ago...

Warcry has an exclusive interview with Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam, and Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter, on Fury. The guys answer pretty much all the questions running through everyone's minds at the moment about the liquidation of Auran Developments, what it means for Fury, what they're aiming to achieve with the Age of the Chosen expansion, and where exactly did it go all wrong...