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More than fancy boots or crazy powers, the one thing every superhero needs is an origin story: a tale of youthful adversity and the slow, awkward scramble towards triumph. Spider-Man was bullied at school and then bitten by a bug. Batman watched his parents gunned down after leaving Zorro. Captain America... um... let's just say he caught his trousers on a magic nail or something? That sounds about right.For Project Awakened, the origin story kicks off back in 2007 with a small team at Midway Chicago prototyping a video game. Named Hero, it was inspired by the character creation tools of superhero MMOs, but it would allow you to then take your newly minted cyborg ninja, flying clown, or vengeful aqua-guy and throw them into a full-on action adventure with proper shooting and brawling and plenty of blasting people with funny lightning spikes that burst from your hands.
"Hero started with same basic idea of, 'What if we, the developers, weren't going to tell a player what character they have to play with or how to play through an action game, but they get to decide those things and the game changes and adjusts around their choices?'" says Chip Sineni, director of Phosphor Games, the studio which has recently launched a Kickstarter for Hero's spiritual successor. "This is beyond what some MMOs have done, as those are not true core action gamer experiences. We want a real action game. Hero was approaching a vertical slice, where most of the systems are roughed in and started to hook together, so the rough vision of the game is there."
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