I was looking forward to checking out Battletech at Gamescom, even if it was the only game I would check out that wasn't really an RPG. The presentation of Battletech started with Mitch Gitelman from Harebrained Schemes providing us with some information on the history of Battletech and what Harebraines Schemes is making. He discovered that many of the journalists he spoke to never heard of Battletech before. As it has such a very rich history, he wanted to share some of it by means of a few slides.
The Battletech franchise is over 30 years old and was created by his partner Jordan Weismann as a tabletop wargame. From there it went on to be all sorts of things. There have been hundreds of additional game supplements all about the game settings, different factions and its history. The Battletech setting goes on for hundreds of years, so there are different eras of Battletech. Over 200 novels have been written and they are still being written today. There is an animated cartoon and several derived video games, from the MechWarrior, where you were inside the cockpit, to the MechCommander series, an RTS game Mitch worked. MechAssault was the very first multiplayer game on Xbox Live. The last turn-based Battletech game was released in 1990, 27 years ago and Harebrained Schemes is now working on the next one, going back to the roots of that tabletop wargame.
The game was funded in an hour on Kickstarter in 2015 and raised over 2.7 million dollars and is still getting money to this date by late backers.
