Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studios has offered brief teasers about what original TV and film titles it has planned for its Xbox One and Xbox 360 audience for months. Today, however, the company officially revealed its lineup of projects currently in development, which will all be released under the Xbox Originals banner.
Today's announcement on the Xbox Wire website says the shows will also be shown on "other Microsoft devices," which suggests that they will be made available in some way on Windows and Windows Phone-based products as well. All of the projects will also have some kind of interactive features.
The first titles will launch this summer. Microsoft has several titles that it says it is "committed" to making, including both a Halo TV series and a Halo digital film project. There's also the "Every Street United" reality series about urban soccer stars, and the sci-fi series "Humans," which will debut in 2015. Additionally, Microsoft will offer live concerts from the Bonnaroo music festival in July.
The other project is called "Signal to Noise," a six-film documentary series that will begin later this year with a project tentatively titled "Atari: Game Over." This weekend, Microsoft filmed the excavation of a New Mexico landfill for that documentary to see if Atari really did bury lots of copies of its "E.T." game for the 2600 console. As it turned out, that was indeed correct.
In addition to the "committed" projects, Xbox Entertainment Studios has several more in development that may or may not be launched. They include three drama TV series: "Deadlands," based on the classic "Weird West" pen-and paper RPG, "Gun Machine," a hardboiled detective thriller based on the novel by Warren Ellis, and "Winterworld," a post apocalypse story based on the comic book from writer Chuck Dixon and artist Jorge Zaffino.
Other projects in development include an untitled comedy variety series with Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera among the producers, the stop motion comedy series "Extraordinary Believers" with Robot Chicken's co-creator Seth Green as an executive producer, and "Fearless," a reality series that follows the travels of Paul de Gelder, an Australian Navy bomb clearance diver and shark attack survivor, as he helps other people who risk their lives in different situations.
Today's announcement did not reveal if Microsoft will charge extra for viewing Xbox Original programming on its game consoles or if it will be included in the price of an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft
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