Phosphor Games' Awakened is based on Midway's canned open-world game Hero

With Midway Chicago being sold to Warner, the team behind the open-world action game Hero lost all assets, code, art and everything else pertaining to it in the process. So, when the remnants of that team went on to form Phosphor Games, it decided to continue work on the game in the form of Awakening, but unfortunately, it had to start all over from scratch.

Speaking in an interview with Gamasutra, Phosphor Games head Chip Sineni has said the team hopes Awakening, ts spiritual successor to Hero, will strike a cord with publishers and finally get into the hands of the public.

"We just totally started over," said Sinen. "We don't have any connection to the old codebase, story, assets, whatever. What we have is the very cool idea that create-a-player is this really awesome opportunity to change your character and your abilities to whatever you want them to be.

"We're really just trying to let players create their own kind of person. In that kind of way, those games [Prototype, Infamous], we keep getting compared to them and we're actually pretty different. How powerful create-a-player is, is really the coolest feature about the whole game. It's really hard to show that in a way that isn't flipping through a lot of menus."

Sineni goes on to say later in the interview, the game isn't anywhere near completion, but he decided to talk about the game since there was so much misinformation floating around the Internet on it.

"We totally weren't planning on talking about it until... this weird disinformation started popping up on the internet," he said. "It's really, really early. We're talking to numerous publishers on it. We've had a lot of back-and-forth. But for right now... the vision we most want first, before we get too serious [with a publisher]. We have other projects in the queue, so we're able to do that right now."

Phosphor Games did some work on Kinect Adventures for Microsoft, but Sineni didn't reveal what else besides Awakened the firms as working on at the moment.