Acclaim Announces 'Top Secret' MMO Competition For $1 Million Prize

Acclaim Games announced it will present a $1 million prize to the winner of a game development competition for the “Top Secret” Project, directed by David Perry. Teams of indie, mod, professional, amateur & student game developers can enter and compete to develop an MMO game, get an industry standard development deal, and earn royalties on the title. Acclaim recently announced the "Top Secret" project's initial phase when it called for art and concept submissions. Teams will manage their projects and resources at ModCenter, a developer site recently launched by IGN Entertainment. ModCenter will provide free tools for the teams participating in the “Top Secret” $1 million game development competition. As part of this cash prize, Acclaim will pay the licensing fees for any commercially available video game engine in the world, thereby removing one of the biggest obstacles preventing many talented developers from releasing professional products. “The ‘Top Secret’ team is where the concept of Web 2.0 meets the video game industry. We’ve had close to 50,000 people sign up to help design this game. The best participant will win a future Acclaim title to direct,” says David Perry, Game’s Director. “With so many people involved, this is already the biggest team in history. I am directing the project, but this game is going to be designed by the community, produced by the community and developed by the community.” The basic core of the game has already been designed, and Acclaim describes it as a "beast-racing game that doesn’t stop at racing alone." The “Top Secret” design includes the ability to breed and collect beasts, fight in player-versus-player battles, and explore an expanding world. IGN’s ModCenter will provide online project management and tracking tools for all “Top Secret” development teams for free. Teams will manage their projects at the ModCenter site, where they can organize tasks, track bugs, store source code, and communicate with team members. This also allows teams to become “virtual,” meaning that individuals around the world can join together to form new virtual teams and still work on the same project. ModCenter was built by IGN around the SourceForge toolset by CollabNet and is completely free to use. ModCenter is aimed specifically at modification and independent game development. The new site provides project management utilities, industry educational resources and promotional services to the development community. Utilities include a bug-tracking system, project discussion forums, source code repositories, a wiki system, document storage and an internal file release system, all controlled via a project administration area. The competition is open to any developer worldwide who is technically qualified to create the game. It will be published by Acclaim. Users can sign up to participate in the “Top Secret” Project for free by visiting http://topsecret.acclaim.com, and can kick off their projects from the ModCenter site. “Giving users the power and tools to create one-of-a-kind development projects aligns directly with why IGN created ModCenter in the first place,” said Jamie Berger, SVP Consumer Products & Technology for IGN Entertainment. “Joining with Acclaim and David Perry on this groundbreaking project builds on IGN‘s commitment with ModCenter to support the creation of new and unique game concepts from within the gaming community.”