Oddworld's Citizen Siege still on track

Oddworld Inhabitants has said its ambitious new videogame and CGI film project Citizen Siege is still very much in development.

It was speculated that proceedings had come to a halt after former partner Vanguard had "creative differences" with the developer. But this has affected nothing - although the focus has shifted off games at Oddworld.

"Citizen Siege is a project near and dear to our hearts so while we are no longer developing it with Vanguard due to the famous 'creative differences', it is still in development," Oddworld co-founder Sherry McKenna told GamesIndustry.biz.

"We still care about creating games although perhaps not in the way we did in the past," she said. "We are just in the process of finalising our new Oddworld 2.0 plan."

Citizen Siege, the film, will be produced by John H. Williams of Shrek fame, and directed by Lorne Lanning of Oddworld.

Lanning, incidentally, was replaced as president of Oddworld Inhabitants yesterday by Larry Shapiro from Brash Entertainment - the struggling publisher that focuses on movie-to-game adaptations.

The upshot of this will be unleashing Lanning on what he does best: dreaming up wacky ideas.

"Lorne has always had the title of president but now with our new model he is going to concentrate on what he loves most and that of course is the creative," added McKenna.

"Larry will get to deal with all the 'stuff' presidents of companies have to deal with. The good news is that we all see the future in a similar vein so that makes it very exciting."

There's no word on what exactly Citizen Siege will be, unfortunately, but we do know Maxis co-founder Jeff Braun will be helping with the project.

Oddworld Inhabitants was responsible for, surprisingly, the Oddworld series of games on Xbox and PS1.

The most recent of these was Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, which you can find out all about on the relevant gamepage.