Wallace and Gromit studio Aardman is partnering with Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe to create a new project that will live across multiple forms of media.
According to Aardman’s official announcement (opens in new tab), the new stories will be “tailored for current and future platforms”. The two companies aren’t revealing any more details regarding what the new intellectual property will be about, though you can look back to their previous collaboration 11-11 Memories Retold to start thinking about the possibilities.
11-11 Memories Retold was set in World War 1, and it used a painterly visual style as well as the voice talents of Elijah Wood and Sebastian Koch to tell the stories of two soldiers on either side of the war. That was a standalone creation, but it sounds like this next collaboration between Aardman and Bandai Namco will be much more broad.
When Official Xbox Magazine spoke with Aardman Digital creative director Dan Efergan in 2018, he said “definitely somewhere in our future is a stop motion video game, you know, by using the principles and techniques of stop motion as much as possible.” Aardman is famous for using stop motion to bring clay characters like Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep to life, but it wasn’t a good fit for the way it had approached 11-11 Memories Retold.
Maybe this new collaboration with Bandai Namco will be a better opportunity to revisit that classic Aardman style in interactive form.
See what else is on the way in the meantime with our guide to new games 2020 and beyond.