14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Electronic Arts has filed two trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office linked to one of the best strategy games of the last twenty years, Alpha Centauri, suggesting that the company might be ready to create another title using the same concepts and mechanics.
The first of the trademarks is linked to “entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game; provision of information relating to electronic computer games provided via the Internet.”
The second one refers to “computer game software; downloadable computer game software via a global computer network and wireless devices.”
The two trademarks were found by Gamespot and have been filed on August 1.
Electronic Arts has been known to file new trademarks for properties that it has no plans to further develop in order to protect its rights for the games it already has in its portfolio.
Strategy fans will probably hope that the situation is different for Alpha Centauri and that the company is actually working on something related to the franchise.
Alpha Centauri has been created mainly by Brian Reynolds, with some input from Sid Meier, and is a sort of a spin-off for Civilization, showing what happens with the crew of the spaceship that is a victory condition in the turn based franchise.
The game has seven wildly different factions, all filled with personality, that land on Alpha Centauri and need to deal with each other but also with the aggressive plant life of the world.
The game is notable for its story, for the way it combined grand strategy with micro management and for the complexity of both its research and its design mechanics.
Firaxis is currently working with Take Two on the Civilization franchise while Brian Reynolds is at the moment employed by Zynga, where he recently created Facebook title Empires & Allies.