Red redemption announces february release date of global strategy game

Social impact gaming indie developer Red Redemption is pleased to announce the global English language edition of their PC game FATE OF THE WORLD scheduled for release on Monday 28th February 2011.

Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game covering the next two centuries, from 2020 to 2200, in which the player must find a way to protect Earth's ever‐depleting resources and climate whilst reconciling the needs of a growing world population who demand more food, power, and living space. Time is running out.

Having secured the very best in creative gaming talent with music from critically acclaimed composer Richard Jacques (Mass Effect, Alice in Wonderland and James Bond: Blood Stone) and writing by award‐winning screen writer David Bishop (Doctor Who, 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Magazine), the game has already been highly praised. The game has four challenging missions with over 40 hours of compelling gameplay covering 12 regions and steeped in the latest climate science:

1. Rise of Africa: No other region has so much to lose or so much to gain. Can you bring peace and prosperity to this troubled continent?

2. Oil Crisis: Mankind stands at the brink of two disasters: the spectre of Peak Oil alongside that of climate change. Can you transition society from oildependency to a sustainable energy solution without causing major energy
shortages or destroying the environment?

3. 3 Degrees: Our world is rapidly changing. Our nations have agreed they must avoid global warming exceeding 2 degrees Celsius but their emissions targets mean that the world is on course to miss this goal and by 2020 the challenge to avoid global catastrophe is monumental. Once you have achieved 3 degrees or less you unlock the 2 degree challenge. You will lose if the temperature change exceeds 3 degrees by 2200. Can you safeguard both the planet and its people? If not which do you choose?

4. Dr. Apocalypse: Saving the world is easy! There is only one challenge that benefits a super‐villain, to raise the planet's temperature to a dangerous level and gather all power to yourself! Provides humorous relief and the chance to see the what‐ifs!

Available to buy for $9.99, £9.99 or €9.99, direct and through Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamersGate and with a charity donation version available through International Agency Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, the global TckTckTck campaign, and TakeITGlobal, Red Redemption will bring Fate of the World to a truly global audience.

Gobion Rowlands, Communications Director, Red Redemption said; "Following a successful beta period towards the end of 2010, where thousands of players from around the world gave feedback on all aspects of the game, we have been able to incorporate tens of thousands of changes into the final version of Fate of the World giving players the opportunity to play with and explore a wide range of different and dramatic futures for the world. We are incredibly proud of Fate of the World and as well as being a dramatic strategy game we also hope it will be an innovative campaigns tool and source of revenue for our charitable partners."

Building on the intuitive mechanics of card games, a variety of free‐form elements are included in the form of policies. These are presented as virtual cards allowing players to make decisions such as creating a new space programme, funding further fusion research, or rebuilding cities.

Through their explorations of the next two centuries, players can engage with the principles of geo‐engineering, fusion power and wildlife adaptation as they navigate their way through the options available to them. Players can impose policies such as banning logging in the Amazon rainforest, making all Europe's public transport run on electricity or imposing a one‐child policy throughout Asia.

Oxfam's UK digital campaigns manager Ged Barker said: "Fate of the World has the potential to increase awareness and levels of understanding of the complexities of
climate change by playing them out in a visually engaging way. The game is an interesting step away from traditional methods of campaigning and has the potential to show the vulnerability of people around the world living on the frontline of climate change. We recognise this is a significant new way to spread the word about the urgent need to tackle climate change".

Paul Horsman, Campaign Director at the Global Campaign for Climate Action that runs TckTckTck.org said: "Fate of the World is a great way to introduce people to the challenge of slowing down and reversing climate change and engage them in the solutions which will eventually save the planet. Many are now willing to roll up their sleeves, and we hope that the master plans for the planet in this game will also inspire people to design their own missions for positive changes in the real world.â€

Friends of the Earth’s Head of Climate, Mike Childs said: “Fate of the World provides a great opportunity to explore the options and massive challenges ahead without getting bogged down in the real world reality of wading through piles of reports or attending endless meetings. The fate of the real world is in the hands of humankind. With mass extinctions and climate change we've already created one hell of a mess – and politicians around the globe must act now to get us out of it. Hopefully David Cameron, Barak Obama, Angela Merkel and other world leaders will play this before they next meet – it might just inspire them to pull their finger out and get moving on working together to save the planet.â€

Fully immersive and deeply engaging, Fate of the World has been developed under the guidance of a full‐time team of researchers who collectively worked on the model of the game, which is based on official data from the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United Nations. As well as data from real‐world climate models, Fate of the World includes input from a team of scientists and economists in the USA and UK, including University of Oxford climate change expert Professor Myles Allen, Professor Diana Liverman, Dr Cameron Hepburn and anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow striking a unique balance between absorbing entertainment and possible near‐future reality.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recognizes the valuable role technology can play in education and the inclusion of NOAA’s data in games like Fate of the World allows us the opportunity to reach a much wider audience. Fate of the World looks into the future, using the latest scientific models and predictions to simulate the various disasters and pitfalls that are likely to await humanity over the next two centuries including floods and famines, wars and wildfires, droughts and deforestation and should provide a very insightful and exciting gaming experience wherever it’s played.

Dr. Otis Brown, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in Asheville, North Carolina, says: "The use of real data and models provides an excellent
introduction to the complexities of balancing global energy needs with available resources."

Creative Director and Lead Designer, Ian Roberts, adds: “There's real data here, but it is applied data in the same way that you have realistic physics in a Formula One game ‐ when you corner you want it to feel like a real F1 car; with Fate of the World we are modelling the world, we want it to respond with similar fidelity."

“This game world – like the real world ‐ is divided into regions (each with their own problems and contributions to the system) and you push the regions to do things you want. Sometimes the things you try will have major side effects, sometimes the regions will push back, sometimes the climate will throw hell at you and sometimes you totally deserved it. Games are superbly suited for expressing the impacts of climate change, you have both the chance of them happening and how much they’d hurt if they did. It’s not easy to get a feel for that when reading an article on climate change but a gamer understands this relationship all too well – it’s Left4Dead’s survivor, as the clock goes up the chance of that tank is greater and tanks really hurt.â€

British Film Producer Lord David Puttnam CBE says, "It's been fascinating getting to know Gobion and his team at Red Redemption and to watch the development of their
climate challenge game Fate of the World. I've witnessed the failure of many, many initiatives over the years when it comes to addressing the urgent issues around limate change. Where traditional communications channels are struggling, video games open up a whole new range of experiences and opportunities to learn and explore subjects such as climate change ‐ and in ways never before available. Brave and talented companies with a social conscience like Oxford games company Red Redemption are taking up this challenge. Fate of the World is clever, it's demanding, it's pretty scary, it's dramatic, it makes you think, it's certainly not all that easy but, most of all, it's extremely good fun."

Oxford climate change expert Professor Myles Allen who leads the climateprediction.net project, allowing people from around the world to volunteer time on their personal computers to help with climate modelling, has provided state‐of‐theart climate science for the game, he said: "For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke‐free conference centres or through talkshow sound‐bites. The public, confronted by some people telling them it is the end of the world, and others telling them it is all a tax‐raising scam, is being completely excluded from the real debate on what to do about it. What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining Methane Clathrates (gas trapped in Arctic Ice), for example? It sounds plausible to tap the energy from methane that is going to be released anyway, but large‐scale mining might destabilise whole swathes of sea bed, leading to a catastrophic release.â€

“Games like this also help to illustrate on the importance of learning as we go. No climate policy we set today will dictate the emissions of our grandchildren, but what we can try to do is leave their options open, to let them decide, with much more knowledge of the climate system than we have, what level of climate change they can tolerate. One point the game illustrates very clearly is how some policies, like letting emissions rise willy‐nilly over the next few decades, close off possible futures. It is this inertia, in both the climate system and the global economy that makes the problem so difficult ‐‐ and makes the game so challenging!

Hopefully games like Fate of the World will help raise these issues. Also that climate change is a multi‐agent problem – we need a model that allows for the many priorities of different parts of the world. And finally the game shows the moral ambiguity around tackling climate change – climate policies can cause harm as well as good. The science does not dictate the solution – that was the mistake many people made in the build‐up to COP‐15 – science can help inform us which solutions are likely to work, but ultimately it is up to politicians and the public to decide what to do.â€

Fate of the World has also taken advice from environmental economist, Dr Cameron Hepburn, who specialises in climate policy and long‐term decision‐making, he says of
the game, “Games can provide a really fun way of getting to grips with complex international strategic challenges, like climate change. ‘Learning by playing’ will only become more important as time passes, including at the highest levels of government. For instance, policymakers involved in climate negotiations could learn a great deal from playing Fate of the World and some of them already are.â€

• Fate of the World goes on sale from Tuesday 15th February 2011
• A percentage of revenues will go to organisations including Oxfam, TckTckTck and Take It Global
• Age: 12+
• Language: English
• The Mac version and additional language (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech and Russian) launch dates will follow
• Red Redemption will offer a site license based‐version of Fate of the World for academic institutions who order 30 or more copies with a 10% discount. More details here: Fate of the World

System requirements:
• Operating system: Windows XP, Vista, 7, (OSX at Mac launch)
• Processor: 2.33Ghz processor or better
• Memory: 2GB (Windows Vista/7 3GB recommended)
• Hard disk space: 1GB
• Video: 512MB graphics card
• Sound: Integrated sound
• DirectX®: 9

Key features:
• Over 100 policies ‐ including geo‐engineering, technological research, international aid, diplomacy, economics, emergency defences, species protection, forestry, health, energy choices, population, politics, and clandestine operations
• More than 1,000 impacts ‐ including storms, floods, heatwaves, flash fires, desertification, glacial melt, sea level rise, resource wars, drought, famine, dissidence, extinctions, epidemics, technological breakthroughs, energy shortages, and political backlash
• 50 signature animal species to save ‐ against the backdrop of enormous biodiversity loss
• 40 specific future technologies to develop ‐ including nuclear fusion, biofuels, nanotech, robots, AI, smart grids, advanced medicine, synthetic food, and space exploration
• 6 'tipping points' ‐ world‐changing events such as the Amazon collapse and the Antarctic ice shelf collapse
• Achievements ‐ dozens of side objectives
• 3D Earth globe ‐ showing climate related changes with Earth overlays ‐ revealing local temperature change, devastation, and population
• Earth 'telemetry' ‐ visually graphing past and future change
• Card history ‐ a visual reminder of your policy choices, past and present
• News channels ‐ updating world events
• Encyclopedia (FotWpedia) ‐ explaining the key concepts