New mobile game coming from the people behind Just Cause

The developers behind Just Cause are working on a stylized, tactical game for mobile devices, Avalanche Studios founder Christofer Sundberg tells Polygon.

"It's a new IP," Sundberg said. "We came up with it in 2006 and pitched it to publishers. A few were interested but at the time most publishers wanted nice, high-end graphics and photorealistic environments, while this was more stylized similar to what Borderlands is today."

Sundberg says the game is the byproduct of a "bunch of guys fiddling around" and that it is hard to pin the title to a single genre.

"I don't know how to describe it," he said. "It's sort of a management fighting game."

And by fighting, he told me, he means like Command & Conquer. The plan is to release the game this year, he said.

The idea to start working on a mobile project came about because Sundberg realized that most of Avalanche's projects take quite a lot of time to develop.

"I don't know how to describe it. It's sort of a management fighting game."

"We had a team that asked if we, as a company, were interested in going to the mobile space," Sundberg said. "We assigned a budget and we let them play around with different concepts for a while. This was one that really, from a creative standpoint, really touched a nerve with me. So we just decided to explore the mobile world with one game at first, and then we'll see if that works. If it does, then we'll definitely do more mobile games.

"It's great to offer that diversity of projects for our teams. For people who work in New York, or who work in Stockholm, they can work on a big AAA console franchise, they can work on a free-to-play game, or they can work on a mobile game."

Sundberg said that Avalanche has quite a large catalog of projects that they've pitched but haven't gone anywhere, this one just happened to be a great fit for mobile.

And if it works out, perhaps it could one day show up on consoles, he said.

"It's been sitting on our server," he said, "and as we started up our mobile/tablet project I went through our old material and thought ‘Why invent something new when we have such excellent material in front of us?'"

Make sure to check out our full interview with Sundberg about The Hunter, the history of Just Cause and where things stand on Just Cause 3.