Top Secret: $1,000,000 Prize For Indie Developers

Early this year, Acclaim and David Perry announced the Top Secret project. This was a game where fans got to design their own title and contribute to its development. Originally, Acclaim was going to hire a a development team to put it together, but now they're offering $1,000,000 to the independent development team that does the best job on this bike racing MMO. It's a competition within a competition.

We have many more details in our AGDC interview with Perry, which you can read here in the coming days.

Record Breaking $1M "Top Secret" MMO Computer Game Development Competition Announced

IGN's ModCenter.com exclusively hosts Acclaim's "Top Secret" Project

Los Angeles (September 7, 2007) - Acclaim Games is pleased to present the biggest gaming prize ever in a $1 million game development competition for the "Top Secret" Project, directed by superstar game director David Perry. Teams of indie, mod, professional, amateur & student game developers can enter a once-in-a-lifetime competition to develop a real MMO game, get an industry standard development deal, and earn royalties on the title. Teams will manage their projects and resources at ModCenter (http://www.modcenter.com), 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.

The total prize package is worth up to $1 million, plus royalties, to the winning development team. 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 is a ground-breaking new kind of 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 www.modcenter.com 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.

"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."

ModCenter was built by IGN around the SourceForge toolset by CollabNet (http://www.collab.net) 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. Go to www.modcenter.com to start your team's project now.

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