Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster is moving into gaming in a multi-license deal with studio Pomme, starting with a game based on his classic Midworld novel.
Foster told me this in an exclusive interview for GamesBeat.
A New York Times best-selling author, Foster has written multiple book series, over 20 standalone novels, and novelizations of movie scripts including Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Transformers and Star Trek. He has written for games before, but now he’s doing a big license of much of his work in the HumanX Commonwealth series.
Pomme is going to start with Midworld, the first novel in that series where humans encounter an alien race on a jungle-like planet. Some say this world inspired James Cameron’s Avatar films, but we won’t go there just yet. Suffice to day it’s a creatively imagined world that Foster told me in an interview lends itself to a gaming universe.
Pomme founder Darryl Still said in an interview with GamesBeat that Foster will work closely with the game team in an advisory role. Pomme, a consulting firm with many games under its belt, will assemble a team to make the first game and set up the plans for multiple games.
Under the agreement, Pomme could make at least 14 of Foster’s works into games, including previously published novels and eight unpublished works, released in a series called “Alan Dean Foster Presents….”
As mentioned, the first will be an adaptation of Midworld – the book that launched Humanx Commonwealth, which will be published by Pomme’s publishing arm Sunset Sugar Studios on PC via Steam in 2026.
Foster said, “I look forward with great pleasure to working with the wonderful folks at Pomme as they prepare to develop and release a series of games based on my stories, the first of which is planned to be Midworld.”
Pomme was founded by industry veteran Darryl Still, formerly an executive at Atari, EA, Nvidia and Kiss. He has more than 40 years of experience in games in the industry. He is joined by Canadian industry exec Jillian Mood, who has worked with Canada Game Expo, Ottawa Game Jam, Bendy & the Ink Machine and on over 30 games. She will head up marketing and HR for the company.
Other Pomme executives include James Deputy who has project managed many games for Kiss over the 12 years while Still was CEO for that company; and Mateo Młodowski, developer of the hugely successful Pixel Puzzles franchise and development director at Sunset Sugar Studios, Pomme’s publishing arm.
“I have been working with Alan and the Pomme team for around a year now fleshing out this project and it is an absolute pleasure to be able to push the green button as we enter 2025 on what is one of the most exciting developments I have ever worked on,” Still said.
And Mood said, “Alan Dean Foster is an absolute genius and the fact he wants to be personally involved in developing these games makes me very proud.”
Pomme is collaborating with key members of the Cuphead art team, including respected animator Tina Nawrocki, to lead the art on Midworld. Pomme’s studio head Mateo Młodowski said, “As soon as we started talking to them, it became obvious they were perfect to create Börn and the other characters in the universe. The creativity they bring to the art and animation is stunning.”
Meanwhile, Pomme has established an advisory board of entertainment giants to help steer the Alan Dean Foster projects. It includes Alan Wilson, cofounder of Tripwire Interactive, publisher of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, and Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, who has worked on Game of Thrones, Star Trek and Walking Dead games.
Origins of the deal
Foster, 78, has had 80 of hi sown novels published, with seven short story collections and over 40 novelizations of film scripts. (I read Foster’s novelizations of Star Wars, including Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, back when I was young).
Still founded Pomme in the United Kingdom in April 2020 as a consultancy to serve the global game businesses. Key contributors include James Deputy, Jillian Mood, and Matteo Mlodowski. Pomme (the French word for Apple) is named after Still’s love for Pomeranian dogs.
Still said that he was talking with a friend who was making a documentary about Foster’s life. The friend connected them to look into the idea of publishing games based on Foster’s unpublished works. Foster suggested the HumanX Commonwealth universe, and the team decided to make a triple-A game focused on Midworld, the first in the series, Still said.
“Midworld ideally suits our art team, which comes from Cuphead and 2D action adventure properties. We also have an Unreal Engine 3D shooter team in place that can do great things with the trilogy,” Still said. “We have licensed 14 different titles from Alan and are looking at the right teams to make each game. Some of these will be episodic with Alan narrating them.”
Still added, “We want to do the right games on the right properties and do him proud. He has a retro fan base and we can introduce it to a new fan base of gamers, and we have an ideal set of people to do that.”
Sunset Sugar Studios is the publishing arm with a publisher account on Steam. Via Mood, Still is looking for funding from the Canada Media Fund. Another available team is based in Turkiye. It’s a small team, but with big ambitions, Still said.
“This is because of the enthusiasm of people who are crazy about doing this,” Foster said. “And there are certain books like Midworld, which they’re going to start with, that are more easily adaptable into games. And fortunately, there’s enough material. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
Writing for games?
Foster said he wrote a narrative for The Moaning Words, a Lovecraft-like collectible card game with puzzles that debuted in 2014. He ssaid it taught him the complexity of writing for games and how you have to back and fix things in the narrative based on when the player counters them in the game.
“It got very complicated, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. My history with games goes way back. I did the novelization of an original computer game that was called Shadowkeep for Trillium,” he said. “That was a thousand years ago. I also did a version of LucasArts’ The Dig game. So I’ve been around the gaming industry without being directly involved with it for a long time.”
Foster said he believes that games capture actions like movement so well, and he has to write such action scenes over and over again in his various works. Early on, however, game technology couldn’t really keep up with the imagination. Now that problem has gone away as gaming tech has moved forward quickly.
HumanX Commonwealth games
“Some projects didn’t live up to the promise, but they were interesting experiments. With games, you have more options and I love the possibilities,” he said. “With Midworld, we actually have a story with different levels.
The Commonwealth series has numerous characters like Philip Lynx, who appears in 15 of the books in the series. There are dozens of books and they’re all part of the same sci-fi universe, with some fantasy elements. The HumanX Commonwealth is kind of like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, where in the future the humans of Earth have allied with other alien races like the insectoid Thranx from Hivehom.
“Thank goodness for computers and fans, or I’d never be able to keep this all straight,” Foster said.
He said he is glad to see so many transmedia successes, where games have been turned into movies like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and TV shows like The Last of Us.
“Technology advances along with storytelling,” he said. “You started out scratching pictures on cave walls. They didn’t move, and they weren’t very exciting. And now we just move along, and each time the technology advances, somebody finds a way to adapt it for entertainment. And that’s what’s happened with games. And once it gets sufficiently sophisticated, then you can take the game and expand it into film or TV. It would be interesting to contemplate, for example, if Tolkien were alive today, 22 years old, would he have started by writing books or would he have started it as a game?”
Foster added, “Everything changes so fast. I love it. I love things. And the newest thing that comes along, I’m there. I want to be a part of it.”
Regarding some recent films, Foster said he was a big fan of Flow, which has no dialogue. As for the tech entrepreneurs who are always trying to turn science fiction into reality, Foster has some opinions.
“They get so wrapped up in stuff, I think, and they’re so distant from the people that they actually are supposed to be serving that they kind of forget what that’s like,” Foster said. “I haven’t met many of them and I’d be happy to sit down and chat. I don’t know. You wonder if you can have influence on people. In my books, I try to do it gently. I don’t believe in socializing or shouting.”
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