14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer Valve has announced that it has hired Doug Church, a veteran game designer that has previously worked on such classics as Ultima, Thief and System Shock.
After working at Origin Systems and at Looking Glass Technologies, Church moved to Eidos, where he worked until 2005, when the decided to become an executive producer at the Los Angeles studio of Electronic Arts.
There he worked on something called Project LMNO, a game which was supervised by Steven Spielberg but was canceled some time ago.
Doug Lombardi, who is the vice president of marketing working at Valve, has told Gamasutra that Doug Church has been working at Valve for a couple of weeks and that he is not sure what specific game development project he is now working on.
Both Thief and System Shock are important milestones in the history of gaming, titles that managed to subvert the expectations of the player and throw tough but fun challenges their way.
At the moment a new Thief game, the fourth in the series, is being developed at the Montreal studio of Eidos and is set to be published by Square Enix.
Little detail has been offered on the game and it currently has no launch date, but the developers have expressed an interest on respecting the initial concept of the Thief series.
System Shock has received a well-regarded series, but the franchise has not been yet revived by any developer.
The more recent BioShock and the older Deus Ex are seen as spiritual successors to the game.
The rights to the game are with Electronic Arts so its unlikely that Valve might be preparing a System Shock 3.
The big video game release for Valve in 2011 is Portal 2, which is coming in late April, and fans are widely expecting an announcement linked to the new Half Life game.