New 2010 'Medal of Honor' reboot updates series with modern-day warfare

(All rights reserved - Electronic Arts)

Electronic Arts has announced a new game in the dormant 14-game Medal of Honor series that had trailed off in the later half of the decade. The reboot is entitled Medal of Honor and has been slated for a July - August 2010 release, while the first preview trailer will be shown during the Spike TV Video Game Awards on December 12.

The new game is being developed as a collaboration between EA's Los Angeles studio, which has worked on most of the previous games in the series, and the Swedish-based DICE group which has built the successful and popular Battlefield series from the ground up.

The Medal of Honor franchise debuted on Sony's first Playstation console in 1999 and then took the PC and console gaming world by storm when, in 2002 it popularized the World War II gaming genre with visceral and cinematic missions offering people the chance to play through the D-Day Normandy landings that had been just previously depicted so powerfully in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Saving Private Ryan.

Whereas all the previous games in the series have been set against the events of World War II, the new Medal of Honor game is a modern-times shooter featuring a US special operations unit in the war-torn Afghanistan of recent years. By doing so, EA is setting up the Medal of Honor series as a direct competitor to Activision's Modern Warfare series, the most recent episode of which has been breaking sales records and fast becoming one of the most played games of the year despite a November release.

It has also emerged that the preliminary cover art stars real a US Special Forces officer who goes by the name of "Cowboy" and was featured in a 2002 Life magazine photo feature, another reflection of EA's quest for authenticity in the franchise reboot.

Medal of Honor 2010 site: www.medalofhonor.com
Spike TV Video Game Awards show: spike.com/event/vga2009