A recent investment by Calculus Capital strongly indicates that a new Doctor Who game, made by the developers of Doctor Who: The Edge of Time, will be released for PS5 and Xbox Series X sometime in 2021. Doctor Who: The Edge of Time was a VR title released in 2019 and developed by Maze Theory. The game received mostly middling reviews; most critics agreed that while it was heavy on Doctor Who fanservice, the gameplay was limited, clunky, and regrettably brief, and it offered little replay value.
Licensed games, in general, are a very mixed bag. Generally, when one thinks of licensed games, one pictures cheap cash-ins made to coincide with movie releases. These games are typically either shoddily made or just outright bizarre. Worse than that are infamous titles like E.T. the Extraterrestrial, the Atari 2600 title frequently cited as the leading cause of the video game market crash of 1983. But not every licensed game is bad enough to end up buried en masse in a New Mexico landfill; one needs only to look at the long, proud legacy of Star Wars titles for evidence of that. While that franchise has certainly had some disappointing and even outright terrible video games attached to it, it’s also achieved great success with games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
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Other science fiction series have had much less success in the video game market. Doctor Who, for instance, has almost no presence in the industry. None of the meager handful of licensed Doctor Who games have achieved anywhere near the success of its source material. Maze Theory may yet change this, however, despite the relative ignominy of its most recent attempt. Calculus Capital, a British fund manager, has invested in the developer through their UK Creative Content EIS Fund. In the financial report following this investment, Calculus mentions that Maze Theory is intent on delivering a new Doctor Who experience to PC, console, and even mobile platforms, and is working on getting this project released in 2021.
While no mention was made of the specific consoles this new title would be released to, it seems likely given the 2021 release date that they will arrive on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, next-gen consoles set to release at the end of this year. Like any new console release, anticipation for these nextgen systems has been high, but the news has certainly been quite up and down for both. The Xbox Series X, for example, recently had to contend with a gameplay reveal that left many fans furious when it showed almost no actual gameplay. Still, both consoles have promised high performance, and a brand new Doctor Who game on this new hardware has the potential to be rather exciting indeed.
Doctor Who has had a long and venerable history since its first pilot aired back in 1963. While it hasn’t ever risen to the level of sci-fi juggernauts like Star Wars or Star Trek, it remains a beloved show enjoyed by many and has established a long and rich canon packed with material that could fare wonderfully in a video game environment. The Edge of Time delivered on fans’ dreams to play with their own sonic screwdriver, but it fell flat in so many other ways. Doctor Who fans deserve better. And maybe with this new investment and, potentially, the new hardware offered by the next generation of consoles, Maze Theory can deliver better.
Source: Calculus Capital
