Ideas are more powerful than ray-guns: Stalin vs. Martians gets a publisher

GamesIndustry.biz carried a short blurb this morning on Paradox Interactive -- the Stockholm based publisher of primarily PC strategy titles like Galactic Civilizations, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron -- launching a new sub-label, Mezmer Games, specifically for indie games.

In itself that might not have immediately turned my head, but then I spied three words which tickled a long since dormant part of my brain: Stalin vs. Martians. It turns out the game will be one of the first to get the Mezmer treatment, and it's one I hadn't thought of since nearly a year ago when Russian developer Dreamlore Games first announced it.

If you think there's some part of you that's mis-reading the title, you're not: the light and accessible PC arcade/real-time-strategy game is precisely what it says on the ration-tin, and gloriously so. Dreamlore spoke to friends of Offworld Rock, Paper, Shotgun last year after the first reveal, and explained (?) how the game came to be:

Obviously we were drunk a little bit and that’s how it all started. No vodka was involved though. Only rakia. We were drinking beer and at the certain point imagined that we are Serbs and continued our conversation after buying a bottle of the magical South Slavic drink. Perhaps it had some impact on the further discussion, so actually right now I’m starting to think of Stalin vs Martians as a Russian-Serbian co-production. Sort of.

The final shape of things and the final version of the concept came later, when we were 100% sober (believe us or not), but at the very beginning alcohol had its part. And was an important tool for the breakthrough of the Serbian game development industry, since Stalin vs Martians is perhaps the most groundbreaking Serbian computer game ever.

Even more wonderfully, at the same time, designer Alexander Shcherbakov also told EVO Gamer that the game would "use Chinese pop music in the soundtrack 'as our tests showed that combination of mandapop/cantopop and Stalin game makes brains explode instantly. And that’s exactly what we want to achieve with our project.'"

Mezmer doesn't currently have a projected release date for the game beyond Q2 of this year, but they do have an additional screenshot showing the playable Stalin unit himself, standing some 200 feet tall above his units as he did in real life, and I think that's all I really needed to sate myself until it arrives.

Stalin vs. Martians home [Dreamlore Games, Mezmer game home]