A Shadowrun game has been announced! There’s just one problem:

when we decided to do Shadowrun we realized there was a ton of baggage that came with it. We had been through it with our BattleTech games (MechWarrior, MechCommander, MechAssault) for years and had the battle scars of trying to please hardcore fans and new players at the same time. It’s a rough road to travel and it usually ends in tears. Fans got pissed because we weren’t “following the rules” or “keeping to canon”. New players felt like outsiders because so much had gone on before it was like starting to watch LOST in season three…

So what should we do? Satisfy fans of the paper and pencil game? The novels? The SNES and Genesis games? It wasn’t a long debate, really. We decided to restart the Shadowrun timeline and grow the fiction over a series of games, allowing the world we loved to unfold over time.

The natives are not amused.

And who can blame them? There is a whole bunch of people who have been waiting faithfully for a Shadowrun game to become a reality (I am one of them). I feel somewhat like I did when early reports of the new Superman movie reported that the director didn’t think the Man of Steel should fly. It will be interesting to see if a similar fan revolt will occur, and if so, if it will result in similar results.

Original comments thread is here.