“That’s the whole underlying idea that we’ve been working at Subutai,” he answered. “Subutai [was] never intended to be just a game company, but it’s trying to come to grips with the media world as it is today, where publishing is a much more dynamic thing. It’s streaming prose directly out to people’s devices. Film entertainment is no longer a thing you need to go to a movie theater for, and games can obviously be downloaded on Steam and so on. What we’re trying to do is to take the basic sensibility of science fiction, which is a world-building- as opposed to a storytelling-sensibility and find ways to take one world and show that in multiple different media.

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“As you probably know, we’ve been working on the prose part of that and now the graphic novel part of it," he said. "That’s going well. That’s on an even keel. We’ve been working on some film entertainment projects but that’s a longer lead-time item. It’s a lot more complicated. Then Clang is the game.”

Stephenson wants your patience. The man who’s imagined cyberpunk universes and various tipping points for humanity insists that Clang’s timeline isn’t over just yet. You might even have a part in making it. For now, the future of this swordfighting game hasn’t yet been written.

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