Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster is moving into video games as part of a multi-licensing deal with studio Apple, starting with a game based on its classic novel Midworld.
Foster told me in an exclusive interview for GamesBeat.
A New York Times bestselling author, Foster has written several book series, more than 20 standalone novels, and novelizations of film scripts, including Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Transformers, and Star Trek. He’s written for video games before, but is now heavily licensing much of his work in the HumanX Commonwealth series.
Apple will begin with Midworld, the first novel in this series in which humans encounter an alien race on a jungle-like planet. Some say this world inspired James Cameron’s Avatar films, but we won’t get into that just yet. Today, it’s a creatively imagined world that, Foster told me in an interview, lends itself to a gaming universe.
Apple founder Darryl Still said in an interview with GamesBeat that Foster would work closely with the game team in an advisory role. Apple, a consultancy with many games under its belt, will assemble a team to make the first game and draw up plans for several games.
Under the deal, Apple could turn at least 14 of Foster’s works into games, including previously published novels and eight previously unpublished works, published in a series titled “Alan Dean Foster presents….»
As mentioned, the first will be an adaptation of Midworld – the book that launched Humanx Commonwealth, which will be released by Apple’s publishing arm, Sunset Sugar Studios, on PC via Steam in 2026.
Foster said: “I look forward to working with the great people at Apple as they prepare to develop and release a series of games based on my stories, the first of which should be Midworld. »
Apple was founded by industry veteran Darryl Still, a former executive at Atari, EA, Nvidia and Kiss. He has over 40 years of experience in the video game industry. He is joined by Canadian industry executive Jillian Mood, who has worked with Canada Game Expo, Ottawa Game Jam, Bendy & the Ink Machine and on over 30 games. She will lead the company’s marketing and human resources.
Other Apple executives include James Representative, who managed many games for Kiss over the past 12 years while Still was that company’s CEO; and Mateo Młodowski, developer of the hit Pixel Puzzles franchise and director of development at Sunset Sugar Studios, the publishing arm of Apple.
“I’ve been working with Alan and the Apple team for about a year now to flesh out this project and it’s an absolute pleasure to be able to press the green button as we enter 2025 on what is one of the world’s most successful developments. exciting things I’ve ever had. worked,” Still said.
And Mood said: “Alan Dean Foster is an absolute genius and the fact that he wants to be personally involved in the development of these games makes me very proud.”
Apple is collaborating with key members of the Cuphead art team, including respected animator Tina Nawrocki, to lead the art on Midworld. Apple Studio Director Mateo Młodowski said: “As soon as we started talking to them, it became clear that they were perfect for creating Börn and the other characters in the universe. The creativity they bring to art and animation is breathtaking.
Meanwhile, Apple created an advisory board made up of entertainment giants to help shepherd Alan Dean Foster’s projects. It includes Alan Wilson, co-founder of Tripwire Interactive, publisher of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, and Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, who worked on the Game of Thrones, Star Trek and Walking Dead games.
Origins of the agreement
Foster, 78, has published 80 of his novels, with seven collections of short stories and more than 40 novelizations of film scripts. (I read Foster’s Star Wars novels, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, when I was young).
Still founded Apple in the UK in April 2020 as a consultancy serving global gaming companies. Key contributors include James Representative, Jillian Mood and Matteo Mlodowski. Pomme (the French word for Apple) got its name from Still’s love of Pomeranian dogs.
Still said he was speaking with a friend who was filming a documentary about Foster’s life. The friend put them in touch to explore the idea of publishing games based on Foster’s unpublished works. Foster suggested the HumanX Commonwealth universe and the team decided to create a triple-A game focused on Midworld, the first in the series, Still said.
“Midworld is a great fit for our art team, coming from Cuphead and 2D action-adventure properties. We also have an Unreal Engine 3D shooter team in place that can do big things with the trilogy,” Still said. “We have licensed 14 different titles from Alan and are looking for the right teams to make each game. Some of them will be episodic and Alan will narrate them.
Still added: “We want to make the right plays on the right properties and make him proud. It has a retro fan base and we can introduce it to a new gaming fan base, and we have a perfect group of people to do it.
Sunset Sugar Studios is the publishing arm with a publisher account on Steam. Via Mood, Still is seeking funding from the Canada Media Fund. Another available team is based in Türkiye. It’s a small team, but with big ambitions, Still said.
“It’s because of the enthusiasm of people who are crazy about doing this,” Foster said. “And there are certain books like Midworld, which they’ll start with, that are more easily adaptable to games. And fortunately, there is enough material. I’m happy to be part of it.
Writing for games?
Foster said he wrote a story for The Moaning Words, a Lovecraft-like trading card game with puzzles that debuted in 2014. He said it taught him the complexity of writing for games and how to save and fix things in the narrative based on when the player thwarts them in the game.
“It got very complicated, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. My history with games goes back a long way. I did the novelization of an original video game called Shadowkeep for Trillium,” he said. “It was a thousand years ago. I also made a version of the LucasArts game The Dig. So I’ve been working in the games industry for a long time without being directly involved in it.
Foster said he thought games captured actions like movement so well, and that he had to write such action scenes over and over again in his various works. However, early on, gaming technology couldn’t really keep up with the imagination. Now this problem has disappeared thanks to rapidly advancing gaming technology.
HumanX Commonwealth Games
“Some projects didn’t live up to their promises, but they were interesting experiments. With games you have more options and I like the possibilities,” he said. “With Midworld, we actually have a story with different levels.
The Commonwealth series has many characters like Philip Lynx, who appears in 15 of the books in the series. There are dozens of books and they are all part of the same science fiction universe, with some fantasy elements. The HumanX Commonwealth is a bit like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, where in the future the humans of Earth have allied themselves with other alien races like the insectoid Thranx of Hivehom.
“Thank God for computers and fans, otherwise I would never be able to keep this straight,” Foster said.
He said he’s happy to see so many transmedia successes, where games have been turned into films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and TV shows like The Last of Us.
“Technology advances with storytelling,” he said. “You started by scratching images on the walls of the caves. They weren’t moving and weren’t very exciting. And now we’re moving forward, and every time technology advances, someone finds a way to adapt it for entertainment. And that’s what happened with games. And once it’s sophisticated enough, then you can take the game and expand it into film or television. It would be interesting to ask, for example, if Tolkien were alive today, at age 22, would he have started writing books or would he have started it as a game?
Foster added: “Everything is changing so quickly. I love him. I like things. And the last thing that happens, here I am. I want to be part of it.
Regarding some recent films, Foster said he is a big fan of To flowwhich has no dialogue. As for tech entrepreneurs still trying to turn science fiction into reality, Foster has some opinions.
“They’re so wrapped up in everything, I think, and they’re so distant from the people they’re supposed to serve that they kind of forget what that’s like,” Foster said. “I haven’t met many and I’d be happy to sit down and chat. I don’t know. You wonder if you can have an influence on people. In my books, I try to do it gently. I don’t believe in socializing or yelling.
