C&C Labs News Wire

— Monday, April 13, 2009 —

Posted By: Blbpaws at 4:23:09 PM ET

More on C&C Arena, Rumors of C&C 4

Rumors continue to fly regarding the next C&C game and the existence of an "Arena" C&C. We've done a bit of looking, and we have turned up three specific names of people who were involved. By analyzing each, we might get a fuller picture of what's going on. If this is all new to you, read my last post on The Third Floor and C&C.

Felix Jorge

  • His LinkedIn page indicates that he freelanced for The Third Floor (thanks PlanetCNC).
  • He is also credited on the same page for work on Red Alert 3 and C&C 4.
  • No mentions of C&C 3, Tiberium, or Arena could be found on that or other pages linked to him.

Kendrick Leung

  • His resume reveals that he worked on Tiberium, Uprising, and C&C 4.
  • He indicates on the resume that Tiberium was canceled, but does not say this about C&C 4.
  • He's posted lots of Tiberium concept art, which I'm not sure anyone has seen before.
  • He says in a blog post that he worked "near LAX" in July 2008. EALA is near LAX airport in Los Angeles. I suspect he was likely working on Uprising or C&C 4, probably the former.

Barry Howell

  • Currently employed by The Third Floor, according to a website bio (thanks Kodaemon).
  • The bio states the following
    Barry has since provided previs for such movies as Eragon, James Cameron's Avatar, and J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield. He recently supervised the cinematics team for EA’s Command & Conquer 3: Arena as well as CAPCOM's Resident Evil 5. (emphasis mine)
  • This is different from all other listings of the title, which do not include the "3" in the title, leading me to speculate that Arena was a code-name for Tiberium, the cancelled C&C FPS.
  • If we wanted to get a sense of the time frame of his projects, to speculate on when Arena was in development, we can check the release dates of the credited works:
    -Eragon: Dec. 2006 (film)
    -Cloverfield: Jan. 2008 (film)
    -Resident Evil 5: March 2009 (game)
    -Avatar: Dec 2009 (film)

    What can we conclude from this? From the 2005 or so (when the pre-vis on Eragon would have been done)  to the middle of 2008 (assuming pre-vis for Resident Evil was done in mid-2008 for release in 2009) he only had one listed credit (Cloverfield), plus possibly C&C Arena. Wikipedia states that Cloverfield was first shot in June 2007, with green-lighting on other tasks, possibly including pre-vis, happening Feb. 2007. C&C 3, released March 2007 likely had its pre-vis done well before then, so it's possible "Arena" could be C&C 3, as that fits the gap. However, it could still be Tiberium, as we don't know exactly when those pre-vis scenes were done, given that it was in pre-production for so long. All this, of course, assumes that the bio is accurate.

Summed together, I think this is probably more evidence that Arena was a code-name for a past game, either Tiberium or C&C 3. The new material is that it appears quite likely that development on C&C 4, presumably set in the Tiberian universe, has begun. This likely puts to rest any possibility of Generals 2 for quite some time. I do not expect C&C 4 to be announced until later in 2009, as I don't think it's going to make a holiday release.

Last edited by Blbpaws on Monday, April 13, 2009 at 8:26:05 PM.

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