Sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster moves into gaming with Pomme studio deal for Midworld – exclusive

Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster He’s moving into gaming with a multi-licensing deal with Studio Pomme, starting with a game based on his classic novel Midworld.

Foster told me this in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

A New York Times bestselling author, Foster has written multiple book series, more than 20 stand-alone novels, and novelizations of film scripts including Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Transformers, and Star Trek. He’s written for games before, but now heavily licenses much of his work in the HumanX Commonwealth series.

Pomme will begin with Midworld, the first novel in that series where humans encounter an alien race on a jungle-like planet. Some say this world inspired James Cameron’s Avatar films, but we won’t go there yet. It is enough that today this creatively imagined world that Foster told me in an interview is giving way to the world of games.

Pomme founder Daryl Steele said in an interview with GamesBeat that Foster will work closely with the game team in an advisory role. Pomme, a consulting company with several games, will assemble a team to make the first game and develop plans for multiple games.

Under the agreement, Pomme can turn at least 14 of Foster’s works into games, including previously published novels and eight unpublished works, released in a series called “Alan Dean Foster presents….”

As previously reported, the first will be an adaptation of Midworld – the book that launched the Humanx Commonwealth, which will be published by publishing arm Pomme Sunset Sugar Studios on PC via Steam in 2026.

Foster said: “I am very much looking forward to working with the wonderful people at Pomme as they prepare to develop and release a series of games based on my stories, the first of which is set to be Midworld.”

Pomme was founded by industry veteran Daryl Steele, a former executive at Atari, EA, Nvidia, and Kiss. He has over 40 years of experience in the gaming industry. He is joined by Canadian Industry Executive Gillian Maude, who has worked with Canada Game Expo, Ottawa Game Jam, Bendy & the Ink Machine and on more than 30 games. She will head up marketing and human resources for the company.

Other Pomme executives include James Vice who ran several games for Kiss over a 12-year period while still serving as CEO of that company; and Mateo Młodowski, developer of the highly successful Pixel Puzzles franchise and Director of Development at Sunset Sugar Studios, the publishing arm of Pomme.

“I have been working with Alan and the Boom team for about a year to deliver this project, and it is an absolute pleasure to be able to press the green button as we enter 2025 on what is one of the most exciting developments I have ever worked on,” he said. Still.

“Alan Dean Foster is an absolute genius and the fact that he wants to be personally involved in the development of these games makes me very proud,” Mudd said.

Pomme is teaming up with key members of the Cuphead art team, including esteemed animator Tina Nawrocki, to lead the art for Midworld. “Once we started talking to them, it became clear that they were perfect for creating Börn and the other characters in the universe,” said Matteo Modowski, head of Pomme Studio. “The creativity they bring to the art and animation is amazing.”

Meanwhile, Boom established an advisory board for entertainment giants to help guide Alan Dean Foster’s projects. They include Alan Wilson, co-founder of Tripwire Interactive, publisher of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, and John Radoff, CEO of Beamable, who has worked on Game of Thrones, Star Trek and Walking Dead games.

Transaction assets

Foster, 78, has published 80 novels, as well as seven short story collections and more than 40 novelizations of film scripts. (I read Foster’s Star Wars novels, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, when I was young.)

Pomme was still founded in the UK in April 2020 as a consultancy to serve global gaming companies. Key contributors include James Vipes, Gillian Maude and Matthew Mlodowski. Pomme (the French word for apple) is named after Steele’s love of Pomeranian dogs.

Still, he said he was talking to a friend who was making a documentary about Foster’s life. The friend approached them to consider the idea of ​​publishing games based on Foster’s unpublished works. Foster suggested the world of HumanX Commonwealth, and the team decided to create a triple-A game focused on Midworld, a first in the series, Steele said.

“Midworld fits perfectly with our art team, which comes from the Cuphead and 2D action-adventure properties. We also have a 3D shooter team from Unreal Engine that can do cool things with 3D,” said Steele. “We have licensed 14 different titles from Alan and are looking to… The right teams to make every match. Some of these stories will be episodic and will be narrated by Alan.

He added: “We want to play the right games on the right properties and do him proud. He has an old fan base and we can introduce him to a new fan base of players, and we have the perfect group of people to do that.”

Sunset Sugar Studios is the publishing arm and has a publisher account on Steam. Via Mood is still seeking funding from the Canada Media Fund. There is another team available in Türkiye. “It’s a small team, but it has big ambitions,” Steele said.

“It’s because people are obsessed with doing this,” Foster said. “And there are certain books like Midworld, which they’re starting with, that can be more easily adapted into games. Fortunately, there’s enough material. I’m happy to be a part of that.”

Writing for games?

Foster said he wrote a story for The Moaning Words, a Lovecraft-like collectible card game with puzzles that debuted in 2014. He said it taught him how complex writing for games is and how you have to support and fix things in the narrative based on when the player encounters them in The game.

“It got quite complicated, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. My history with games goes back a long way. I remade an original computer game called Shadowkeep for Trillium. “That was a thousand years ago. I also created a version of LucasArts’ The Dig. So I’ve been around the gaming industry without being directly involved in it for a long time.

Foster said that he thinks games capture actions like action very well, and he has to write these action scenes over and over again in his various works. However, early on, gaming technology was not able to keep up with imagination. Now this problem has disappeared as gaming technology advances rapidly.

Human X Commonwealth Games

“Some of the projects didn’t live up to the promise, but they were interesting experiences. With matches, you have more options and I like the possibilities.” “With Midworld, we already have a story on different levels.

The Commonwealth series features many characters such as Philip Lynx, who appears in 15 books in the series. There are dozens of books and they are all part of the same science fiction universe, with some fantasy elements. The HumanX Commonwealth is sort of like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, where humans on future Earths ally themselves with other alien races like the insect Thranx from Hivehom.

“Thank God for computers and fans, otherwise I would never be able to keep all of this straight,” Foster said.

He said he was happy to see so many transmedia successes, with games being turned into films like The Super Mario Bros. And TV shows like The Last of Us.

“Technology is advancing along with storytelling,” he added. “I started by scratching pictures on the cave walls. They didn’t move, and they weren’t very exciting. Now we move, and every time technology advances, someone finds a way to adapt it for entertainment. That’s what happened with games. Once they become sophisticated enough, you can To take the game and expand it into a movie or TV would be interesting to consider, for example, if Tolkien were alive today, 22 years old, would he have started writing the books or would he have started it as a game?

“Everything is changing so quickly,” Foster added. I love him. I love things. And the latest thing comes, I’m there. I want to be part of it.

Regarding some of the recent films, Foster said he’s a big fan of them flowwhich has no dialogue. As for the tech entrepreneurs who are always trying to turn science fiction into reality, Foster has some opinions.

“I think they’re so caught up in things, and they’re so far away from the people they’re supposed to serve, that they kind of forget what it’s all about,” Foster said. “I haven’t met many of them and I’d be happy to sit down and chat. I don’t know. You wonder if you can influence people. In my books, I try to do it gently. I don’t believe in socializing or yelling.”