Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné video game in development!

For Immediate Release

 
Stockholm, Sweden, November 22^nd 2021 – This year marks the 60^th birthday of influential fantasy and sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock’s literary character Elric, last emperor of the island-kingdom of Melniboné. In conjunction with the anniversary of the dark fantasy epic Swedish IP developer Runatyr have acquired the rights to produce a narrative action computer game that will be based on the first six books of the Elric saga.
The video game, titled Elric of Melniboné will be the first audio visual adaptation of the originating epic tale of dark fantasy that has had an immense influence on the genre as a whole and IPs such as Warhammer, The Witcher, Game of Thrones and House of The Dragon in particular.


Developed in a collaborative effort by senior developers behind titles such as Vermintide, War of The Roses and Fable, between Runatyr, Swedish development collective Aurora Punks and UK based studio Upstream Arcade, the game is planned for a 2024 release on PC and consoles.


“Elric is my favorite fantasy character and it feels absolutely amazing that Elric will finally come to life in a video game.” says Yasin Hillborg, creative director at Runatyr. Michael Moorcock is said to have taken a liking to the narrative presented as the story told within the game and will take part in the development.
On the subject of a video game adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s iconic hero the writer has this to say, "For many years I have looked forward to seeing Elric translated into a state of the art video game and at last it looks as if Runatyr are going to bring that dream to fruition! I am sure they will make the best game possible!"



Media contact
Vincent Gallopain
vincent@xogoconsulting.com

About Runatyr
Runatyr is an IP developer based in Stockholm, Sweden. Our mission is to tell stories that entertain, inform, inspire, and provoke thought and evoke the imagination of our audience, using re-constructive approaches and serving the stories on the platforms that tell them best: videogames, film, books or all of the above.
 
About Aurora Punks
Aurora Punks is a collective of independent micro studios collaborating on brilliant games, from ideation to release. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
 
About Upstream Arcade
Upstream Arcade is an independent games studio created to make the games we want to play. We originally levelled up together at Lionhead Studios, working on the Fable Franchise and Black & White 2 and some years later we regrouped to make amazing, stylistic, groundbreaking action games. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.
 
About Michael Moorcock
Listed recently by the London Times as among the fifty best writers since 1945, Michael Moorcock is one of the most important and influential figures in SF and fantasy literature. Author of around 100 books and more than 150 shorter stories in practically every genre, he has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Nebula (for Behold the Man), World Fantasy (for Gloriana), Whitbread (for Mother London) and the Guardian Fiction Prize (for The Condition of Muzak). He has been the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards, including the Prix Utopiales, the Stoker, the SFWA and the World Fantasy, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His BSFA award-winning tenure as editor of New Worlds magazine in the sixties and seventies is seen as the high watermark of SF editorship — blending genre and literary fiction, science and the arts — and was crucial in the development of the so-called SF New Wave. He is also a musician, who recorded and performed in the seventies with his own band, the Deep Fix (The New Worlds Fair and The Brothel in Rosenstrasse [also a novel]), and won a gold disc as a member of the space-rock band Hawkwind (for the Eternal Champion-based album Warrior on the Edge of Time). Michael Moorcock’s literary creations include Corum, the Dancers at the End of Time, Hawkmoon, Jerry Cornelius, Von Bek and, of course, his most famous character, the tragic, albino prince of ruins, Elric of Melniboné. His Colonel Pyat quartet (Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Vengeance of Rome) has been described as an authentic masterpiece of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also the author of several graphic novels including Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse and Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer. His journalism appears in The Spectator, The Guardian, the Financial Times and the L.A. Times, and two unrelated volumes of non-fiction have appeared, the fifty-year-spanning Into the Media Web and the rather more currently focused London Peculiar. His most recent novels are an SF comedy featuring Doctor Who, The Coming of the Terraphiles — perhaps something of a surprise to regular readers, it nevertheless melded that character’s established milieu with Moorcockian ones — and The Whispering Swarm, a novel combining autobiography and fantasy. He and the Deep Fix also released a new album, Live from the Terminal Café, for the Purple Pyramid label in 2019. He has been compared to, among others, Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, James Joyce, Ian Fleming, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Born in London, Moorcock now divides his time between Paris, France, and Austin, Texas. He is married to Linda Steele and has three children from a previous marriage.