Hampstead, NC, 17 March 2008

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All American: The 82nd Airborne In Normandy will soon begin to ship! 

Yeah, that’s what we’d like to lead off a press release with but unfortunately it won’t be this press release.  We’ll let those of you who have been expecting to hear those words pick yourself up off the floor before continuing.  No hard feelings, but it did get your attention, right? 

Work does continue on All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy.  Yes, it’s still alive.  No, we have not abandoned it.  Yes, we suck at getting it out the door but we’re still confident we’ll beat Duke Nukem Forever to a release date, which was announced a year prior to All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy.  That’s gotta count for something.

So here’s what’s happening with development at the moment.  First, there was that rather public falling out last year with the lead programmer.  That set us back a good bit since we couldn’t leave the code in place and had to bring someone else in.  Development got back up to speed though, and everything was humming along when we encountered a rather big pothole in the road to release: Microsoft Vista. 

Microsoft’s Vista, that oh-so wonderful operating system of theirs, has a rather annoying habit of breaking things in All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy.  Like network play on previous OSes.  And there are other issues with Vista.  So thanks to this crap OS we had several choices:

1.  Strip All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy of the features that didn’t work with Vista, or had problems under Vista. 

2.  Not make it Vista compatible.  Tempting, very tempting.

3.  Recode the whole thing for DOS, since folks will probably have better luck running it under DOSBox in Vista than if it was Vista compatible. 

Stripping features is not an option.  Not making it Vista compatible would solve a lot of headaches but look, after all these years in development we’re not going to then shut out part of the market.  And obviously the DOS thing is a joke.  Doing it in Flash would be much better.

If worse comes to worse and the Vista issue continues to impact the ability to get the game to play on XP we may end up releasing two versions, a Vista-only edition and the edition for working OSes.  We’ll try including a sympathy card with the Vista-only edition.

Thanks Microsoft!  Tell us, was Vista released just to push developers towards the 360? Because at this point we’re wondering if we should start developing for consoles instead and save all the headaches associated with Vista.

For those of you who haven’t kept up with the saga of All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy, or haven’t even realized that Shrapnel Games was developing their own in-house title, allow us to bring you up to speed. 

All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy is the sequel to the award-winning, best selling 101st: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy, originally released by Empire Interactive.  Shrapnel Games was formed in 1999 for the sole purpose of bringing the sequel to the market, but soon became a full fledged independent publishing house.  While regretfully this has caused a delay in bringing All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy to you, we’re quite proud of all the great titles we’ve brought to you under the Shrapnel Games publishing label over the years, and so ultimately if we had it to do all over again we wouldn’t change a thing. 

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