British studio and publisher Rebellion is gearing up for the release of Atomfall, an alt-history Stalker-like with a stiff upper lip that CEO Jason Kingsley calls a "dream game." PCG's intrepid Joshua Wolens recently spent several hours in the game, and found himself charmed by the endless distractions, a lack of things like quest markers, and the feel of a world where a rusty revolver is an instant argument-ender.
Atomfall is a new direction from a studio that arguably remains best-known for the Sniper Elite series but, especially in the UK, Rebellion is also known as the publisher and owner of the venerable 2000AD. 2000AD is one of the world's greatest science fiction comics, published since 1977, and the amount of original characters and stories it's produced is endless.
It's also something that Kingsley acknowledges Rebellion hasn't done enough with when it comes to videogames. Rebellion has made several Judge Dredd games over the years (though not in recent times), a very good Rogue Trooper game, and… well, that's more-or-less it.
So it made sense when Kingsley started talking, way back in 2017 initially, about letting other developers play with Rebellion's toys. Rebellion as a videogame developer has several established series that have little to do with 2000AD, and simply couldn't take on the development of a load of comic book properties as well as those.
"2000 AD has always been a challenge," Kingsley told PCG in 2018. "I've always said I wanted to do more 2000 AD-based licences in games, but for one reason or another it's never really happened for us. And it's always slightly embarrassing when people ask me, 'why haven't you done more?' Simple answer is, it hasn't happened really.
"That's when we made the decision to look at external people, and say, 'OK, fine. Here it is officially: if you want to work with 2000 AD licences, brilliant, bring it on, we'll do a business deal, go away and make something really interesting'. And there are people working on things like that, which is very exciting."
You could reel off characters that would make for potentially brilliant games without thinking: Slaine, Nemesis the Warlock, the ABC Warriors, hell even something like Halo Jones in the right hands. When we asked Kingsley how many games were in development in 2018 he said "more than one, and less than twelve."
Fast-forward to 2025, and the number of 2000AD games in my hot little hands? Zero. The idea of letting other developers work with 2000AD and perhaps explore some of the more obscure properties always struck me as something that could really work so, when Josh had the opportunity to sit down with Kingsley recently, I wondered if he could find out just what had happened.
"The option is still open to people," says Kingsley. "We had five or six people start things, put demos together, try and get funding for them. But then COVID happened, and I guess they sort of all fizzled a bit."
It's an opportunity for the CEO to get a little philosophical about how the industry itself works. "Some got some way, you know, we saw demos and went, 'yeah, that looks great. You know, go for it with our support,'" says Kingsley.
"But you know as well as I do: lots of games get started and a relatively small fraction actually get finished. It's quite… it's quite tragic actually the industry. The games you get to see are a tiny representative of the number that get started. Sadly."
Atomfall may well be Kingsley's dream game, but mine would be some sort of ABC Warriors FTL clone, or a Judge Dredd turn-based tactics game, or a time-travelling roguelike Strontium Dog, or... OK I'll stop. I just really love 2000AD, and it's always struck me as weird that Rebellion hasn't made more use of it than it has.
But you can never complain about an honest answer, and this licensing initiative does just seem to have been waylaid by the small matter of a global pandemic and the natural entropy of game development, where a dozen projects are begun for every one that's finished. The door remains open, at least, so I'll keep hoping that the Galaxy's Greatest Comic can one day help serve up some of the Galaxy's Greatest Games.
