‘Whore Of The Orient’ Announced For PC And Consoles

Team Bondi, the company that allowed gamers to experience the seamy underbelly of 1940s Los Angeles with the outstandingL.A. Noire, is back to announce their next game for PC and consoles, Whore Of The Orient. The NeoNoir action adventure game will be distributed by Warner Brothers. It is being produced by Team Bondi in affiliation with KMM Productions.

The newest game from Brendan McNamara and his talented developers at Team Bondi will explore the dark, sinister, and often sleazy world of China during the conflict between Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Army and the communist forces of Mao Zedong. The game’s events will take place in 1936 in the always dangerous city of Shanghai.

The game is described as follows on the Team Bondi website:

“Shanghai, 1936. Whore of the Orient. Paris of the East. The most corrupt and decadent city on the planet, where anything can be had or done for the right price. Plaything of Western powers who greedily exploit the Chinese masses. Boiling pot of Chinese nationalism, with the Kuomintang ruthlessly trying to suppress Communism and the labor movement. Home to the International Police Force, a group of Western cops hopelessly trying to keep the lid on and keep the peace.”

“From the development team who brought you L.A. Noire and The Getaway, along with the Academy Award winning film production team of Kennedy Miller Mitchell comes a completely new and original IP being developed for next generation games consoles and PC.”

The game is being directed by McNamara in association with KMM Interactive Productions, who purchased the rights to the game. KMM’s Mitchell had high praise for Team Bondi, who worked on the game for his Happy Feet Two movie, saying “”Team Bondi immediately went to work on Happy Feet Two. People can move from a game to a movie and be completely at home, because it’s the same skills, process – the same game.”

Mitchell also explained why film studios are becoming more involved in producing video games when he said:

“Films are very expensive, so studios are making drastically fewer of them. They’ll make ten films where they used to make 20. So, instead, people are drifting to game acquisition because of the budgets. The cost of a film may be $170 million – twice that to market it – whereas the basic cost of making a game might be 10% of that. Look at LA Noire, they sold about 3?million units in a week, about $US135 million ($130?million) net revenue, off a cost base which was infinitely lower than even your average low-budget film.”

Whore Of The Orient is beginning pre-production at Team Bondi headquarters. The company is still hiring programmers, artists, and animators to work out of their Sydney, Australia studio. No official release date has been announced, so it looks like we will have to wait a while to play what Brendan McNamara calls “one of the great untold stories of the 20th century.”