Bestselling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster is entering the gaming space under a multi-licensing deal with Studio Pomme, starting with a game based on its classic Midworld novel.
Foster told me this in an exclusive interview for GamesBeat.
Foster is a New York Times bestselling author and has written multiple book series, over 20 standalone novels and screenplay adaptations, including Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Transformers and Star Trek. He’s written for games before, but now he’s licensing a lot of his work in the HumanX Commonwealth series.
Pomme begins with Midworld, the first novel in this series, in which humans encounter an alien race on a jungle-like planet. Some say this world inspired James Cameron’s Avatar films, but we don’t want to go there just yet. Suffice it for the day that it’s a creatively imagined world, which 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 games team in an advisory capacity. Pomme, a consulting firm with many games, will put together a team to develop the first game and lay out plans for multiple games.
Under the agreement, Pomme could adapt at least 14 of Foster’s works into games, including previously published novels and eight unpublished works in a series titled “Alan Dean Foster presents…”
As previously mentioned, the first will be an adaptation of Midworld – the book that launched Humanx Commonwealth, which will be released on PC via Steam in 2026 by Pome’s publishing arm Sunset Sugar Studios.
Foster said: “I’m really looking forward to working with the wonderful people at Pomme as they prepare to develop and publish a series of games based on my stories, the first of which will be Midworld.”
Pomme was founded by industry veteran Darryl Still, who previously held executive positions at Atari, EA, Nvidia and Kiss. He has more than 40 years of experience in the gaming industry. He is joined by Canadian industry manager Jillian Mood, who has worked with Canada Game Expo, Ottawa Game Jam, Bendy & the Ink Machine and on over 30 games. She will lead the company’s marketing and human resources departments.
Other Pomme executives include James Deputy, who project-managed many games for Kiss during the 12 years Still was CEO of that company; and Mateo Młodowski, creator of the highly successful Pixel Puzzles franchise and head of development at Sunset Sugar Studios, the publishing arm of Pomme.
“I have been working with Alan and the Pomme team on developing this project for around a year and it is with great pleasure that I can push the green button at the start of 2025 on one of the most exciting developments I have ever undertaken. “Worked on it,” Still 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 very proud.”
Pomme is working with key members of the Cuphead art team, including respected animator Tina Nawrocki, to direct the art for Midworld. Mateo Młodowski, head of the Pomme studio, said: “When we started talking to them, we realized that they were perfect for creating Börn and the other characters in the universe.” The creativity they put into the Bringing in art and animation is breathtaking.”
Meanwhile, Pomme has formed an advisory board of entertainment giants to steer Alan Dean Foster projects. They include Alan Wilson, co-founder of Tripwire Interactive, publisher of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, and Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, who has worked on the games Game of Thrones, Star Trek and Walking Dead.
Origins of the deal
Foster, 78, has published 80 of his most famous novels, including seven short story collections and over 40 novelizations of film scripts. (When I was young, I read Foster’s Star Wars novels, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye).
Still founded Pomme in the UK in April 2020 as a consultancy to serve global gaming companies. Key contributors include James Deputy, Jillian Mood and Matteo Mlodowski. Pomme (the French word for apple) is named after Still’s love of Pomeranian dogs.
Still said he spoke to a friend who was making a documentary about Foster’s life. The friend brought them together to explore the idea of
“Midworld is an ideal fit for our art team, which includes Cuphead and 2D action-adventure products. We also have an Unreal Engine 3D shooter team that can do great things with the trilogy,” said Still. “We have licensed 14 different titles from Alan and are looking for the right teams for each game. Some of them will be episodic and Alan will narrate them.”
Still added: “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 gamers and we have the ideal people to do that.”
Sunset Sugar Studios is the publishing arm with a publishing account on Steam. Through Mood, Still is seeking funding from the Canada Media Fund. Another available team is based in Turkey. “It’s a small team, but with big ambitions,” said Still.
“It’s because of the enthusiasm of the people who really want to do this,” Foster said. “And there are certain books like Midworld that they’ll start with that will be easier to convert into games. And fortunately there is enough material. I’m excited to be a part of it.”
Write for games?
Foster said he wrote a narrative for “The Moaning Words,” a Lovecraft-like trading card game with puzzles that launched in 2014 when the player counters them in the game.
“It got very complicated, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. My history with games goes back a long way. “I worked on the novelization of an original computer game called Shadowkeep for Trillium,” he said. “That was a thousand years ago. I also made a version of the LucasArts game The Dig. So I’ve been working in the gaming industry for a long time without having anything to do with it directly.”
Foster said he believes games capture action as well as movement, and he has to keep writing such action scenes in his various works. However, early on, gaming technology couldn’t really keep up with imagination. This problem has now been resolved as gaming technology has developed rapidly.
HumanX Commonwealth Games
“Some projects didn’t deliver what they promised, but they were interesting experiments. In games you have more options and I love the options,” he said. “With Midworld we actually have a story with different levels.
The Commonwealth series features numerous characters such as Philip Lynx, who appears in 15 books in the series. There are dozens of books and they are all part of the same science fiction universe with some fantasy elements. The HumanX Commonwealth is somewhat similar to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, where the people of Earth in the future have allied with other alien races such as the insectoid Thranx from Hivehom.
“Thank God there are computers and fans, otherwise I would never be able to handle this,” Foster said.
He said he’s excited about so many transmedia successes, with games being adapted into films like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and TV shows like “The Last of Us.”
“Technology advances along with storytelling,” he said. “You started scratching pictures on cave walls. They didn’t move and weren’t very exciting. And now we just keep going, and every time technology advances, someone finds a way to adapt it for entertainment purposes. And that’s exactly what happened with games. And once it’s sufficiently sophisticated, you can expand the game into film or television. For example, it would be interesting to think about whether Tolkien, if he were alive today, 22 years old, would he have started writing books or would he have started it as a game?”
Foster added: “Everything is changing so quickly. I love it. I love things. And the latest thing that comes: I’m here. I want to be a part of it.”
Regarding some recent films, Foster said he was a big fan of them Flowthat has no dialogue. As for the tech entrepreneurs always trying to turn science fiction into reality, Foster has some opinions.
“I think they get so caught up in things and are so far removed from the people they’re supposed to serve that they kind of forget what it’s like,” Foster said. “I haven’t met many of them and I’d like to sit down and chat. I don’t know. You wonder if you can have an influence on people. In my books I try to do it gently. I don’t believe in socializing or yelling.”
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