In the past few days, teaser trailers have appeared online that have gotten fans excited about the possible announcement of a new MechWarrior game. Well, we can confirm that the title is in development. Forget what you've played before; say hello to MechWarrior. That's its full title, there's no 5 or V after its name; this is a complete reboot for the famous franchise. To learn more, we have an exclusive interview with Smith and Tinker co-founder Jordan Weisman and Russ Bullock, president of Piranha Games . Weisman was also the co-founder of FASA and a co-creator of the BattleTech universe that MechWarrior is based upon.

If you're looking for a quick summary of the interview, check out our revealing. Below, you'll find information about the new storyline, the planned multiplayer and co-op features, and even details about the console transition for the game. You'll also be able to check out the first full trailer of MechWarrior, as well as our Rewind Theater analysis of that video. Finally, make sure you leave your comments – both Weisman and Bullock are interested in finding out what fans think about the new direction that they want to take the acclaimed MechWarrior franchise.

I'll kick off everything; this came about through a series of turns. After I left Microsoft some years ago, Microsoft let the properties lay idle – they hadn't really done much with them. So about two years ago, I was able to negotiate the license that gave me the opportunity to try to do something with those properties because they're all close to my heart, and I hate seeing great universes lay fallow. Of course, in the way of how the world works, as soon as I put that deal together, Smith and Tinker materialized around me in a strange confluence of events and I got swept up in doing Nanovor, which is our big release product this fall. So I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on the FASA properties as I wanted, but I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I wanted to do with them.Russ, who is a longtime fan, and I'll let him tell his story, got a hold of me. We started talking and developed a prototype project on a different subject as a kind of "get to know you," and during that process spent a lot of time talking about our shared passion for reinventing MechWarrior. We've been working on this vision for MechWarrior, of which the video is a component of our thoughts about what the game should be, for the last five months now. The goal was partially a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the property, and mostly as a way of trying to present to the public and to publishers a vision of what a next-generation MechWarrior could be, was to roll this thing out next week.It very much happened like that. I grew up playing the pen-and-paper game; I can thank my brother for that as he dragged his little brother with him to play all the latest role-playing games he could get his hands on. Some of them really spoke to me – a lot of the FASA properties, and especially one that really did was MechWarrior – the BattleTech brand. So when I formed Piranha Games (and Piranha Games will be ten years old this January), it put me in a situation where things like that, when I thought of them, put me in a unique situation to attempt to try to work on some of those passions.Over the years, there was a very miniscule chance that the brands were being used; they were at Microsoft and various companies. It still didn't prevent me from researching what was going on with the properties and, were they available, could I do something? Every year or two throughout ten years, and then, to my surprise, the latest time I went looking around, I found out that Jordan had licensed them back and Smith and Tinker have those rights. That was about October last year and we just started to form that relationship and I got very excited. We continued to strengthen our relationship until we got to where we are today.Yeah, October we started to discuss and talk about things. We started off with paper; we started off with a PowerPoint presentation and we came down and presented it to Jordan and we fine tuned it. We talked about what MechWarrior should be today, and that process took a couple of months. It just so happens--and it's interesting how these things work in life--that we were doing that much, everything we could to work with Jordan on the license, and we were busy at the time finishing off Transformers 2 with Activision. We worked directly with their internal studio LuxoFlux to create the 360 and PS3 SKUs of Transformers 2.So, I found it somewhat interesting and ironic that we were creating another large robot-based type game. That was giving us a lot of experience and knowledge and scale and all of the things that you can imagine would be shared attributes of the two. Although different, there are a lot of shared attributes. So, we were busy working on that, and when we finished working on it in the early spring or late winter, March timeframe, that's when it really started to ramp up having a team full time on the MechWarrior franchise. Not in the full development scenario, of course, but in a "let's create this prototype," something that we can demonstrate what we think MechWarrior can be in a reborn situation.It's definitely a re-launch. I mean, twenty five years of any soap opera, especially space opera, can become pretty difficult for new players to become involved in. We wanted to take the opportunity to re-launch, or as Russ phrased it, redact the universe. Introduce it at the kind of accessible level it was when we first introduced the universe twenty five years ago. This is not unlike what we've seen most recently with Star Trek, Iron Man, Spider-Man…All franchises which, as they reach out to a new audience, need to create an accessible origin story for their beginnings. So that's where we wanted to go to, it's right at the beginning. Actually, the story starts just as Hanse Davion comes to power, so it is just, as you said, at the end of the Third, right at the beginning of what will become the Fourth Succession War.