Citizen Zero Canceled, Spy MMO Announced

Well, leave it to me to mention Citizen Zero yesterday and then see it canceled today. Micro Forté, the Australian development studio behind this Xbox MMO, has officially announced that the game has been canceled. Given this MMO was for the Xbox - not the 360 - this comes as no great surprise. It is good to see that the team remains intact to work on an upcoming spy-themed MMO.

Yesterday, in an article about Interzone Games and BigWorld, I mentioned former Micro Forté marketing guru Robert Spencer was now the COO of that company. I wanted to clarify that he had left Micro Forté quite some time ago and spent some time with BigWorld in between as their Strategic Business Manager.

Micro Forté cancels Citizen Zero project - Announces development underway on new IP.

(Sydney, AUSTRALIA): - Micro Forté, a leading Australian developer of MMOs, today announced that it has cancelled development on the "Citizen Zero" project, with internal development now focused on a top secret spy-themed MMO.

Steve Wang - Head of Studios for Micro Forté commented, "Although we were sad to stop working on CZ, we are extremely excited about the progress of our spy project."

The top secret project has been in production since mid '06 with a core development team working out of Micro Forté's Australian studio.

"We're not giving too much away at this stage," commented Micro Forté Lead Designer, Paul McInnes, "Obviously our new project is a spy-themed MMO, but it incorporates new game-play elements and technologies that we are really looking forward to delivering to the public."

Steve Wang added, "We are at an exciting crossroads where many new game-play styles and experiences have become possible in virtual world environments. This is a great opportunity for us to leverage our 7 years of development in the MMO space to bring the social MMO experience together with game-play that has been traditionally the domain of single player games."

Micro Forté will be making further announcements in the coming months with a view to showcasing the project toward the end of this year. Micro Forté is currently taking expressions of interest from distribution partners and has already begun discussion with some of the world's leading publishers.