Heavy Gear II

Heavy Gear II is a mecha based first-person shooter video game, incorporating third-person and stealth elements. Set in Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear universe, the game was developed and published by Activision in 1999 for Microsoft Windows, it was ported to Linux in 2000 by Loki Software. It is a sequel to the 1997 video game Heavy Gear.

Plot

An atrocity caused by the New Earth Concordat (NEC) — the destruction of the Badlands city of Peace River by an antimatter bomb — leads to a formal cease-fire between the Northern and Southern Leagues. A team of elite Special-Ops pilots from across the planet, equipped with advanced prototype Gears and a newly unveiled intersystem assault shuttle, are sent through the interstellar Tannhauser gate to the planet Caprice, the nearest NEC base, to find out more and strike back at the enemy.

Development

Development of Heavy Gear II began during the autumn of 1997 with an aggressive 13 month schedule which aimed to ship the game in autumn 1998. The Heavy Gear II team was a newly formed group within Activision, composed of some of the best and brightest employees that the firm had available, each of whom had experience working on several 3D games previously. The design team wanted to move away from the larger BattleMech style gears as found in the original Heavy Gear, and to smaller, more agile gears, staying truer the Heavy Gear universe and allowing for faster paced and more diverse gameplay.

Heavy Gear

Heavy Gear is a game universe published since 1994 by Canadian publisher Dream Pod 9. It includes a tabletop tactical wargame, a role-playing game and a lesser known combat card game (Heavy Gear Fighter). The setting is also known through the PC-game incarnations published by Activision in 1997 and 1999, developed after Activision lost the rights to the Battletech/MechWarrior series. It also spawned a 40-episodes, 3D-animated TV series in 2001, which featured a much simplified version of the universe developed in the role-playing game.

The background universe of the game is extremely detailed: several million words have been published to date in more than a hundred books and game accessories. A continual epic storyline runs throughout all of the game's material, with new publications moving chronologically along the timeline.

Heavy Gear is best known for its humanoid combat vehicles (or mecha): the 'Gears' and 'Striders' used by the military forces in the setting. Its mecha designs are typical of those found in the Real Robot anime genre; they are most similar in size and tactical role to those in Ryousuke Takahashi's 1983 Armored Trooper Votoms anime. They're, in fact, generally used in role of special forces rather than armored vehicles.

Heavy Gear (video game)

Heavy Gear is a 1997 computer game based on the Heavy Gear role-playing game. A sequel, Heavy Gear II, was released in 1999.

Development

Faced with the loss of the BattleTech-MechWarrior property, Activision's Production Executive, Frank Evers, spearheaded the acquisition of the video game license in 1995. The game was made for the Windows 95 operating system and was partly based on a game engine derived from existing MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries code. It was released in 1997. Before the release of the PC game an arcade version based on the Virtuality Hardware Platforms was developed but never released. It is unknown if the dwindling interest in Virtual Reality arcade games or the high cost of manufacturing were the reasons, but from the existing footage one can assume that the game was already in a quite late stage of development since even animated instructions on how to use the Arcade hardware and an intro video were implemented as seen in the footage. The working title was "Heavy Gear Extreme".