Earlier this month, Mark Kern’s “massive planetary wargame” shooter Ember got a new name and logo: Em-8ER.
“While still pronounced ‘Ember,’ we changed the official name to Em-8ER after other companies came out with games called ‘Ember‘ on mobile and on Steam,” Kern told followers of his new website. “We wanted to avoid any confusion and carve out something unique for our own name.”
More recently, the game’s team picked up a member of the Nostalrius WoW emulator team, Etiakor. “Hiring Etiakor was made possible by Em-8ER exceeding its prior milestone funding goal by 467%,” explains the introductory dev blog, referring to the game’s recent Indiegogo campaign, which raised $23,000. “With a server programmer on board, Em-8ER will be able to begin laying the foundation for multiplayer, which is scheduled post-Kickstarter early next year.”
Kern is a decidedly controversial (his word) figure to MMORPG genre veterans thanks to his involvement with Firefall and the vanilla World of Warcraft community, among other internet movements. He has previously discussed his plans for the shooter, including “serial Kickstarting” and a Firefall-esque foundation that doesn’t “drift over to ‘WoW with guns’ again.”
