Essential Linkage: Futuremark's game efforts are shown on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
Forty years ago, Neil Armstrong uttered what is possibly one of the most recognisable sentences of recent years, and the age of space exploration was ushered into the limelight. While we haven't quite made such a momentous leap since then, the strides we've taken to honour the achievements made by the crew in the Apollo 11 spacecraft can't be ignored - not if Futuremark has anything to do with it.
The venerable developers of popular benchmarking programs 3DMark and PCMark have bashed their collective heads together to create their version of the space race; rather choosing to bring space to the masses than bring the masses out to space. Shattered Horizon revolves around the moon in the same way that the NASA mission did, but instead of a celebration there is simply confusion.
Set eighty years after Armstrong bounded down the steps of the lunar lander, the world has invested billions of dollars into mining the moon - but an overzealous explosion shatters the celestial Luna into a million pieces. As the effects of the explosion reach the International Space Station and Earth, so must mankind find a way to survive.
Shattered Horizon seems to have a solid and interesting plot, and if that isn't enough then they've also included musings about the game being "a multiplayer first-person shooter", leaving room for a possible MMO or cooperative campaign. They've just released some new screenies for the game, which we've thrown into a gallery to save the hassle of navigating through the flash-based official site.
With the history of Futuremark applied to the game we can only expect pretty graphics, but we remain in the dark for how it will play until the game is released. Until then head into the gallery, check out the announcement trailer below, and make sure you also check out the 40th anniversary story of NASA's moon landing.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012