EA Partners picks up Oddworld's Stranger

The latest publishing deal to be signed by Electronic Arts' EA Partners division will see the company handling the release of Oddworld Inhabitants' next game, tentatively named Stranger, on Xbox and PS2 next year.

News of the publishing deal was announced just after Atari revealed that it had handed back its share of the developer in return for Oddworld's share of $1.8 million in publishing revenues from Xbox-exclusive launch title Munch's Oddysee.

Earlier this year, Microsoft quietly dropped Stranger - which was formerly known as Steef's Oddysee - from its release schedules, which coupled with the Atari move, left Oddworld Inhabitants entirely independent of any publisher.

Little is known about the Stranger project, but it's believed that it doesn't fit into the planned five-game "Oddworld Quintology" which included the Munch's Oddysee title; early looks at the game in a Discovery Channel documentary suggested a quirky FPS title, but no other details have been forthcoming since then.

What's particularly interesting, however, is the decision to publish the title - generally expected to be an Xbox exclusive - on the PlayStation 2 as well as the Xbox. Electronic Arts doesn't have a stated policy on platform exclusivity, that we're aware of, but the giant company has generally avoided releasing anything that doesn't have a PS2 SKU.

Signing the deal with EA, then, may well have forced Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning to swallow some pride; when he moved the Munch's Oddysee project from the PS2 platform to the Xbox initially, he was outspoken in publicly condemning the PS2 as a poor platform for developers to create games on, and his statements made a large contribution to the "conventional wisdom" which says that Sony made a mistake in creating such a complex hardware system. Less than five years later, he's now developing for the platform once more...