Hellgate: Resurrection Heads To Tokyo

After the phenomenal runaway success of Hellgate: London it was only a matter of time before there'd be an expansion... Justhangonaminute. Astonishingly this is not a mad lie. There really is to be a Hellgate: Tokyo. There's even a debut teaser to prove it, below. However, it's looking likely that the Korean owners, HanbitSoft, will be keeping the game and this new expansion inside Asia. Still, with the announcement of a new version of Mythos last week, it's interesting to see what happened next to the disastrous MMO.

So after the collapse of Flagship, and the ensuing squabbles over IP for Hellgate, it all ended with the game in the hands of co-owners, Korean company Hanbitsoft. Namco-Bandai kept the US servers alive until January of this year, and then the game disappeared from Western eyes completely. And wasn't exactly missed. Even Flagship boss Bill Roper said the game "wasn't as good as it should have been", overreaching and failing to please any segment of the audiences they were aiming for. But the story of how they lost the IP is sad, it being owned by the bank and their not having the assets to buy it back. It now seems to be wholly with HanbitSoft, and their investors T3 (who Roper cites as being the reason relationships broke down between the two companies in his frank interview with 1Up.)

Bill Roper is now of course at Cryptic, having worked on Champions Online. And much of the Mythos team from Flagship went on to form Runic and our much-loved Torchlight.

So here, for little more than curiosity, is the teaser for the first expansion of the newly reworked Korean Hellgate: Resurrection. This will be out in Asia next month, with the Tokyo expansion due for release in March 2010. Readers of Asia, do you think you're likely to play?