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Nolan Bushnell Unleashes Battleswarm

Posted July 30, 2009 by David Radd

Nolan Bushnell has had a long career in gaming, not just as a designer but as an innovator and entrepreneur. The creator of Pong and founder of Atari talked to USA Today about his latest project called Battleswarm: Field of Honor, an RTS/Shooter hybrid supported by micro-transactions.

"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, move them around on the terrain, to take on the humans," described Bushnell. "Up to six players can be on each side. There's not a lot of resource mining on the RTS side, but lots of upgrades, which is where our currency MetaTIX comes in."

When asked where he thinks the future of gaming will go, Bushnell said, "I'm a big believer in 'cloud computing,' where you can play games (stored) elsewhere," he mused. "I'm also excited about gesture-based inputs, where you don't even need a remote or controller to play."

Battleswarm sounds neat, but it sounds very similar to Savage: The Battle for Newerth, which released nearly six years ago and spawned a sequel. Still, the strategy/FPS hybrid is something that has not been exploited particularly well, so it'd be nice to see where the genre could go with a little competition.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.