You might remember a few years ago when Niantic made the world leave their houses in order to become Pokémon masters, or something akin to that at least, with Pokémon Go. Now they’re back with a brand new augmented reality game based on the Transformers franchise! That sound you just heard was my mind being blown, by the way.
In an announcement posted to their official blog, Niantic revealed that they’ve been working with Seattle-based company Very Very Spaceship on the new AR game called Transformers: Heavy Metal. In the blog post, executive producer Phil Hong describes the game as:
“This will be a Transformers game unlike any other, an AR game where you’ll get to team up with the likes of Bumblebee and the Autobots in the real world, powered by the Niantic Lightship platform.”
Which is all well and good, but I’m hoping that his excitement just got the better of him and he wasn’t accidentally discriminating against those who want to help the Decepticons.
The game is scheduled for a soft launch in select regions soon. Bloomberg reported further that they will test it in New Zealand first before it gets a full global release by the end of the year.
While details are scarce about the Transformers game at this point, what’s fascinating is the little tidbit buried in the Bloomberg piece which mentions that Niantic has about a dozen games ready to go but had to wait until the world started to get back to normal in order to launch any of them. I’m curious to know when or even if we’ll ever see the company crossover with other anime franchises besides Pokémon. I suppose only time will tell, but in the meantime, I’m super excited about soon getting to battle it out with my own team of Transformers (you know, so long as they aren’t those goody-goody Autobots).
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Sources: Niantic blog, Kotaku, Bloomberg
