In the Good News Department

First, GR's A Song of Ice and Fire RPG has been approved and is heading to print. You can read more about that and future products for the line at www.greenronin.com. Glad I never called this the "must have RPG of 2008."

Also found out today that Pirates of the Burning Sea was nominated as MMO Game of the Year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. There's no chance we'll win but it's nice to get the nod.

Avast Ye!

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This is, of course, our favorite holiday at Flying Lab and in fact Pirates of the Burning Sea is the official video game of TLAPD. We've actually put Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket, the holiday's founders, into the game and they have some special missions on them right now. In one you have to teach a parrot to talk like a pirate, which is pretty funny.

http://www.burningsea.com

If you have not played Pirates of the Burning Sea before, now is the perfect opportunity. We've just started offering free trials, so you can play for two weeks without spending a doubloon. It's more fun than dancin' the hempen jig, mateys.

Talk Like a Pirate Day also works for Freeport, of course. If you haven't picked up Buccaneers of Freeport yet, today is the right day. Yar!

A Sense of Accomplishment

I had to work at Flying Lab both Saturday and Sunday, so I didn't have much of a weekend. I don't mind though because today I wrote my last mission for the Pirates of the Burning Sea launch. Today the game is content complete. Each of the four nations has over thousand missions and I wrote at least a third of those. The format doesn't lend itself to doing easy word counts, but I'd guess I've written at least 200,000 words in the past year. I had a real sense of accomplishment when I submited my final file. I've done work on RPGs, TCGs, minis games, and card games, but this is my first computer game. I'm happy that it's a good one too.

Appropriately enough the pre-order box for Pirates of the Burning Sea should be in stores Tuesday. If you buy it, you get a couple of cool loot items (including a parrot) and you can start playing the game on January 7 instead of January 22 like the rest of the world. My team will be continuing to design new content over the coming months, but that'll be for later updates. The content for the game's debut is signed, sealed, and delivered. Now where's that booty?

Pirates of the Burning Sea Launch Date

The launch date for Pirates of the Burning Sea has been set for January 22. Those of you wondering what I've been working on during the day for the past year can find out in just a few months. Pre-order boxes will be on sale later this month and if you get one you can actually start playing two weeks earlier. John "Cthulhu Built My Hotrod" Tynes, the game's producer, tells you all about it here.

What's the word I'm looking for here? Oh yeah: yaaarrrrr!

In Other Pirate News

In other pirate news, Flying Lab was at E3 in force and things went great. The game got a lot of coverage and yesterday Game Spot chose Pirates of the Burning Sea as their Editor’s Choice for Best MMO of E3. Yaaarrrrr, all other 2007 MMOs will be boarded and their crews put to the sword!