Gaming News Round-Up: February 14th, 2005

Today's round-up includes a major new hire at Midway Games, as well as news on some new Matrix game release dates and announcements. - Midway Games has hired David Sears as their new creative director at Surreal Software, one of Midway's internal development studios. Sears, who comes from Zipper Interactive where he worked on Sony's SOCOM: Navy Seals games, will work under Alan Patore, head of the Seattle-based Surreal. Sears' first project as creative director for Surreal will be an undisclosed game for an unspecified next-generation console; since the new platforms from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all expected to make an appearance at E3 2005, Sears' project could show up there as well, though it may not be a launch title. - The Matrix is making its return to videogames: Sega announced a launch date of March 22 for Monolith's The Matrix Online MMORPG, which continues the Matrix storyline where the third movie, The Matrix Revolutions, left off. Atari also announced the long-promised new console games from Shiny, mentioned in several of its last few financial reports but only coming into the light now. The new game, called The Matrix: The Path of Neo will let players control main protagonist Neo through the movie trilogy's storyline; his absence from the previous Enter the Matrix game was occasionally cited as one reason for its poor reception.