Pre-E3: Next-Gen Shadowrun Confirmed?

The long-rumored video game return of the Shadowrun RPG franchise has been all but confirmed today, according to an opening splash page on Microsoft-owned developer FASA Studio's official web site. The teaser image, shown here, appears on the front page of the company's web site, fasastudio.com. Four distinct characters are shown, all of them highly reminiscent of the RPG series' characters, along with the tagline, "The rules of combat are about to change." Additionally, the domain name shadowrun.com forwards itself to FASA's main website, which seems to indicate that these factors are more than coincidence. Shadowrun's return to the video game world was unofficially confirmed July of last year, when FASA Studio animator Theron Benson commented to consumer web site RPG Vault that a Shadowrun project was in development for the Xbox 360, describing it as "a first-person shooter based on an old paper RPG of the same name from a couple decades ago." If true, this project will mark the first American Shadowrun video game in over twelve years, following games for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, which were developed by Beam Software and BlueSky Software, respectively. Shadowrun is a traditional "pen and paper" RPG, initially developed by FASA Corporation between 1989 and 2001, when the company closed its doors and transitioned its intellectual property rights. FASA Studio, developer of the MechAssault, Crimsons Skies and, apparently, Shadowrun video game franchises, is the result of a reorganization of the original FASA Interactive division, which was sold to Microsoft in 1998. The current intellectual property rights to the ShadowRun franchise currently belong to FASA co-founder Jordan Weisman's WizKids Inc., who continue to publish Shadowrun traditional role playing games through Chicago-based FanPro LLC.