As the SOCOM series slowly went off the rails, careening further and further away from what made the early games so good, fans were left with nowhere else to go. As anyone who liked early Rainbow Six or SWAT games will tell you, when it comes to tactical shooters, they just don't make 'em like they used to.
Or, to be more accurate, they don't make 'em at all.
Which is why David Spears, creative director of the original SOCOM games, has put a studio together to develop H-Hour: World's Elite, and is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund it.
While the lack of a publisher means he had nobody to think of a better name, it also means he's free to develop a new game that's "the spiritual successor" to the old PS2 SOCOM games. Here's the brief:
Like many fans of the early SOCOMs, you may be among the legions asking for an HD version of SOCOM II. This isn’t that. We’re not here to simply deliver the past in a prettier package. We’re building the spiritual successor to the early SOCOM games from the ground up. H-Hour: World’s Elite is immediate, realistic, multiplayer-oriented and team-based. It is an experience directly inspired by the SOCOM series because those games were the starting point. H-Hour is several miles down the road that we traveled with SOCOM, the kind of shooter that SOCOM would have become if I had continued to helm the series beyond the second release.
So, yes, another Kickstarter so old games nobody makes anymore can be made for the people who still want to play them. The devs are asking for $200,000.
H-Hour [Kickstarter]