Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster moves to play a multi-license deal with studio Pomme, starting a game based on his classic Midworld novel.

Foster told me in an exclusive interview for GamesBeat.

A New York Times best-selling author, Foster has written numerous book series, more than 20 standalone novels, and novelizations of movie scripts including Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Transformers and Star Trek. He’s written for games before, but now he’s doing a huge license with most of his work in the HumanX Commonwealth series.

Pomme will begin with Midworld, the first novel in the series where humans encounter an alien race on a jungle-like planet. Some say this world inspired James Cameron’s Avatar films, but we won’t go there yet. Suffice it now that this is a creatively imagined world that Foster told me in an interview lends itself to a gaming universe.

Pomme founder Darryl Still said in an interview with GamesBeat that Foster will work closely with the game’s team in an advisory role. Pomme, a consulting firm with several games under its belt, will assemble a team to make the first game and set up plans for more games.

Under the agreement, Pomme will turn at least 14 of Foster’s works into plays, including previously published novels and eight unpublished works, released in a series called “Presented by Alan Dean Foster….”

As mentioned, the first is an adaptation of Midworld – the book that launched the Humanx Commonwealth, which will be published by Pomme’s publishing arm Sunset Sugar Studios on PC via Steam in 2026.

Foster said, “I’m looking forward to working with the wonderful people at Pomme as they prepare to develop and release a series of games based on my stories, the first of which is planned to be Midworld.”

Pomme was founded by industry veteran Darryl Still, a former executive at Atari, EA, Nvidia and Kiss. He has more than 40 years of experience in the games industry. He is joined by Canadian industry exec Jillian Mood, who has worked with Canada Game Expo, Ottawa Game Jam, Bendy & the Ink Machine and more than 30 games. He will head marketing and HR for the company.

Other Pomme executives include James Deputy who project managed several games for Kiss for 12 years while still CEO of that company; and Mateo Młodowski, developer of the hugely successful Pixel Puzzles franchise and development director at Sunset Sugar Studios, Pomme’s publishing arm.

“I have been working with Alan and the Pomme team for almost a year now developing this project and it is an absolute pleasure to be able to push the green button as we enter 2025 on what will be one of the most exciting improvements I’ve ever worked on,” he said.

And Mood said, “Alan Dean Foster is an absolute genius and the fact that he wants to be personally involved in the development of these games makes me proud.”

Pomme collaborated with key members of the Cuphead art team, including respected animator Tina Nawrocki, to lead the art of Midworld. Pomme’s studio head Mateo Młodowski said, “As soon as we started talking to them, it became clear that they were perfect for creating Börn and the other characters in the universe. The creativity they bring to the art and animation is amazing.

Meanwhile, Pomme established an advisory board of entertainment giants to help manage Alan Dean Foster’s projects. It includes Alan Wilson, cofounder of Tripwire Interactive, publisher of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, and Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, which has worked on Game of Thrones, Star Trek and Walking Dead games.

Sources of the deal

Foster, 78, has 80 of his sown novels published, with seven short story collections and more than 40 novelizations of film scripts. (I read Foster’s Star Wars novels, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, when I was a kid).

Pomme was still established in the United Kingdom in April 2020 as a consultancy to serve global gaming businesses. Key contributors include James Deputy, Jillian Mood, and Matteo Mlodowski. Pomme (the French word for Apple) was named after Still’s love of Pomeranian dogs.

He is even said to have spoken to a friend who is making a documentary about Foster’s life. The friend connected them to explore the idea of ​​publishing plays based on Foster’s unpublished works. Foster proposed the HumanX Commonwealth universe, and the team decided to create a triple-A game focused on Midworld, the first in the series, it is said.

“Midworld fits well with our art team, which comes from Cuphead and 2D action adventure properties. We also have an Unreal Engine 3D shooter team in place that will do a lot of things in the trilogy,” he added. “We have licensed which is 14 different titles from Alan and looks at the right teams to make each game. Some of these will be episodic with Alan narrating them.

Furthermore, “We want to make the right games on the right properties and make him proud. He has a retro fan base and we can introduce it to a new fan base of players, and we have a ideal group of people to do that.

Sunset Sugar Studios is the publishing arm with a publisher account on Steam. Via Mood, Still seeking funding from the Canada Media Fund. Another available team is based in Turkey. It’s a small team, but with big ambitions, he said.

“It’s because of the motivation of people who are crazy to do it,” Foster said. “And there are some books like Midworld, which they’re going to start, that are easier to adapt to games. And fortunately, there’s enough material. I’m happy to be a part of that.”

Writing for plays?

Foster said he wrote a narrative for The Moaning Words, a Lovecraft-like collectible card game with puzzles that started in 2014. He said it taught him the complexity of writing for games and how you need to restore and repair items in the narrative based on when the player counters them in the game.

“It’s been very complicated, but it’s been a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. My games history is back. I developed the novel into an original computer game called Shadowkeep for Trillium,” he said. “That was a thousand years ago. I also made a version of the game The Dig at LucasArts. So I’ve been around the gaming industry without being directly involved in it for a long time.

Foster said that he believes that plays capture action like acting well, and he has had to write such action scenes over and over again in his various works. Early on, however, game technology never kept up with the imagination. Today that problem is gone because gaming technology has improved so quickly.

HumanX Commonwealth games

“Some projects do not live up to the promise, but these are interesting experiments. In sports, you have more options and I like the possibilities,” he said. “In Midworld, we have a story with different levels.

The Commonwealth series has many characters such as Philip Lynx, who appears in 15 of the books in the series. There are many books and they are all part of the same sci-fi universe, with some fantasy elements. The HumanX Commonwealth is like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, where in the future the humans of Earth form an alliance with other alien races such as the insectoid Thranx from Hivehom.

“Thanks to the computers and the fans, or I wouldn’t be able to keep it all straight,” Foster said.

He said he was happy to see many transmedia successes, where games were turned into movies like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and TV shows like The Last of Us.

“Technology has evolved along with storytelling,” he said. “You started carving pictures on the walls of the cave. They don’t move, and they aren’t very exciting. And now we just keep going, and every time technology improves, someone finds a way to adapt it for entertainment. And that’s what happens in sports. And once it becomes sophisticated enough, you can take the game and expand it to film or TV. It is interesting to ponder, for example, if Tolkien were alive today, 22 years old, would he start by writing books or would he start it as a play?”

Foster added, “Everything has changed so much. I love it. I love things. And the newest thing that’s coming, I’m there. I want to be a part of it.”

Regarding some recent films, Foster said he was a big fan flowingwithout dialogue. As for tech entrepreneurs who are always trying to make science fiction come true, Foster has some opinions.

“They’re so wrapped up in things, I think, and they’re so far away from the people that they’re actually supposed to serve that they forget what that’s like,” Foster said. “I’ve met a lot of them and I’m happy to sit down and have a chat. I don’t know. You wonder if you can influence people. In my books, I try to do it slowly. I don’t believe in socializing or shouting.”