Gemini: Heroes Reborn is part of a 10-year journey to creating the ultimate superhero game

Phosphor Games has been waiting almost 10 years to make its dream superhero game.

The developer’s latest project, Gemini: Heroes Reborn (coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 12), isn’t that game. But it is another crucial waypoint in Phosphor’s long and winding journey of trying to get its idea off the ground. Loosely based on the Heroes Reborn TV show, Gemini is a first-person action adventure that tells the story of Cassandra, a young girl who must use her newfound powers to save herself and her friend from a shadowy government organization.

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While playing Gemini at a recent press event, I saw traces of Phosphor’s opus — it previously went by the names Hero and Project Awakened — in the game’s creative use of powers. Even though Hero and Project Awakened never came out, Phosphor’s ongoing efforts to revive those ideas was what led it to work on Gemini and other Heroes Reborn games in the first place.

It almost seems like fate. But to understand how Phosphor ended up here, we have to start at the beginning — back when its first employees were still a part of the now-defunct Midway Games.

When superheroes weren’t cool

Thanks to an onslaught of recent comic book movies and TV shows, superheroes have become more popular than ever. People no longer have to hide their love for characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man, or Supergirl.

But that wasn’t the case back in 2006. Around that time, Midway Chicago conducted a focus test where it asked participants what kind of characters they’d like to play as. Among the choices the developers included were Altaïr from the first Assassin’s Creed game, characters from G.I. Joe, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, and superheroes like Batman and Superman.

“All of the [other] game characters were picked well over the superheroes,” said Phosphor cofounder and director Chip Sineni to GamesBeat. “Nobody wanted to be these characters in tights. Tights like that were just not cool.”

At Midway, Sineni was part of a small team working on Hero, a huge open-world game for consoles that would let players customize their own superhero with different looks and powers. The team realized it could never create the ultimate superhero character, so it wanted to give players the chance to make their own.

The core idea of Hero was about ordinary people in the real world suddenly gaining powers, and it was up to the player to decide how to use them.

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“How would you twist that everyday [experience with your powers]? What would you do if you could slow down time? … What would you do at Starbucks? Would you get ahead of the line?” said Sineni.

Coincidentally, 2006 was also the year the NBC show Heroes debuted. It had a similar name and premise to Midway’s game. But while the show would last four seasons, Hero never saw the light of day: Midway cancelled it after two years of development. In an interview with Gamasutra in 2011, Sineni talked about how chaotic that time was, where “everyone was in denial that Hero wouldn’t get made, somehow.”

Midway later filed for bankruptcy in 2009 (Warner Bros. subsequently acquired most of its assets for $33 million). Sineni and other former employees moved on and founded Phosphor Games Studio in Chicago. Their goal was to keep Hero — or at least its ideas — alive in a new game. But without access to their work at Midway, they had to start over.

One door closes …

Phosphor quietly toiled away on its spiritual successor to Hero while doing contract work and creating the mobile games Horn and Dark Meadow. Dubbed Project Awakened, the new game retained Hero’s customizable character options, but it was no longer focused on an open world. Phosphor also decided to target PC instead of consoles. The studio showed it around to different publishers, and while many of them liked the concept, no one was willing to make a deal.

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In 2013, Phosphor decided to put Project Awakened’s fate in the hands of potential players by launching a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Sineni and others featured in the pitch video promised a dynamic world that’d respond to how you played the game. But Phosphor fell short of its $500,000 goal, raising just $338,498.

“I think one of the reasons why that hasn’t come out is [because] how the industry has really shifted. About every year, we get a publisher who’s super interested in it — ‘Can we still make that game?’ But the whole economics of game-making keeps shifting. These days, it does seem like you either have really huge triple-A type games with hundreds of people and costs upwards of $40 million [or a small indie project that becomes popular]. … Project Awakened is the kind of game that really does need a staff and budget.”

The developer also tried taking private donations, but that didn’t work out, either.

Once again, the team had to put its dream aside to work on other games. But at least one good thing came out of its failed crowdfunding attempts.

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Earlier this year, Heroes came back on NBC after a five-year absence with the semi-reboot Heroes Reborn. And publisher Imperative Entertainment (cofounded by the show’s creator, Tim Kring) wanted to make games based on the series. Imperative’s Brad Santos liked what he saw in the Project Awakened Kickstarter and thought Phosphor Games would be perfect for the job.

So far, their collaboration involves two interconnected games. In October, Phosphor released Heroes Reborn: Enigma for iOS and Android, a first-person puzzle-solving game akin to Portal. The more combat-heavy Gemini continues Enigma’s story from the perspective of a different character.

Scratching that superhero itch

Gemini seems promising. My favorite power was Cassandra’s Time Jump, which lets her time-travel to 2008 or 2014 (along with any objects she might be carrying) at will. This opens up some fun ways for dealing with enemies. At one point, I grabbed a soldier with telekinesis, time-jumped to the past, dropped him off, and then went back to the present.

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I used Time Scout — it opens a window into the time period you’re not currently in — to watch my confused captive look for me. He doesn’t know that I’ve trapped him there forever.

The do-what-you-want gameplay is reminiscent of Phosphor’s initial goals for Hero and Project Awakened. Sineni told me that while making the telekinesis power (Cassandra can lift and throw objects or people with her mind), the team felt like it was also revisiting what it started with the 2004 Midway game Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.

“To do that kind of giant, create-a-player and mix-and-match [of powers] was beyond the scope of the Heroes project,” said Sineni. “We were like, ‘Well, what could we do that we actually couldn’t have done in those games? What would be something really neat?’ Some of the time powers came out of that. Time powers are kind of hard to control in a huge [world] — anyone can do whatever they want anywhere. But in this case, because it’s a more story-driven thing, we could do some of these powers we’ve always wanted to explore.”

Parts of Project Awakened has been trickling down to Phosphor’s other games. Nether, a multiplayer survival game, takes place in a ruined city, an urban environment that’s only slightly different from the city envisioned for Project Awakened. Nether also has a wing glider that lets you briefly fly through the world, which is kind of like the flying mechanics Phosphor was planning for the superhero game.

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“The thing for us is that we still have never fully scratched this itch,” said Sineni. “We’ve been working on this [idea] since 2006, and we never fully — we touch around it. … There are parts of the Hero idea in Nether, and there are definitely a lot of parts of it in the Heroes games. We’re antsy to completely tie those together.”

Publishers continue to approach Phosphor Games about making Project Awakened a reality. They hold discussions every year at industry events like the DICE Summit and the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow. But it still hasn’t been made.

“We tend to think where [Project Awakened] might fit best in today’s market. It may not exist in that name and that exact same time period of the present day,” said Sineni. “But I think there’s a lot of other ways to do it. … Especially when you look at all the other multiplayer-type games people are doing. There’s a really strong multiplayer game in that concept, and I think it just needs the right presentation to really get publishers excited about it.”