From Gametrailers.com :

A Song of Ice and Fire Games Announced
May 12, 2009 @ 2:56pm

Cyanide, an independent video game studio, and George R. R. Martin today announced their partnership to create the first-ever video games inspired by the author’s award-winning, international bestselling ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ fantasy series. Under the terms of the agreement, Cyanide has obtained the exclusive rights to develop ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ video games for next-generation consoles and PC, and in collaboration with George R.R Martin, development has begun.

"We are all huge fans of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, so it is a true honour for our teams to be entrusted with creating the first video games inspired by this masterpiece" stated Patrick Pligersdorffer, Managing Director of Cyanide. "The twists and turns of the plot will allow us to deliver an experience which can be enjoyed by both long-time fans as well as gamers new to the series."

Published most notably by Bantam Books in North America and Voyager Books in the United Kingdom, the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ novels have been translated into more than twenty languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian) and have been nominated for numerous prizes. Set in a world where nothing is simply black and white, the rich web of characters makes it an ideal background for numerous genres of video games.

‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ has already been adapted into a card game and a board game. More recently, HBO acquired the rights with the intent of turning the novels into a television series.

We'll keep you posted on the game deets as they emerge.

i hope its not an MMO...there are a bunch of them dying every day.

Actually, I'd like some sort of mp option to this game, being MMO or whatever. I don't have terribly high hopes for this, but I would love to explore the world in detail. What I find the most ironic is that Martin's books are more about the characters and politics than about the fighting -- which is what most video games are about.

You can get that across with a single player campaign. Have you ever played knights of the Realm? Its one of the better older PC games. It was very political and if you were bad at it it gave you big disadvantages. The main drawback was that once you played it a couple of times you knew how to react to each computer player...but with good enough programing this can be overcome. I thik Civ 4 or one of the expansions (haven't played them yet on the PC) is also a good example of politics mattering.

I'm not saying i wouldn't want a MP aspect...i just don't want an MMO

What if it were an MMO with a particularly innovative social system? Something that rewarded both alliance-building and back-stabbing? I haven't the faintest clue how to pull that off, but it would be a better fit for the source material than most of the computer game archetypes that are out on the market right now (whether single-player, multi-player, or MMO...).

MMO's just don't last. I can point out at least 3 MMOs that came out in the last 6 months that are struggling or closing right now.

plus i'd like it to be enjoyable no matter how many people are online. And do you really want to run around Dorne killing rats, scorpions, and asps for the first 5 days of your game play?

I think it would be better if it had a Neverwinter Nights MP aspect.

It had a single player game, and folks could run servers and thier own games mmo style. If they want to.

@Lars

Knights of the realm III was a great game.(with the knight, bishop, baron, countess, ...) indeed. Played the game for many hours when I was young(er).

I'm not getting my hopes up because the last 2 games that I played(from Cyanide Studios) were Loki and Chaos League which weren't so great.

I had more fun with the 10 page comic that was included with Chaos league then the game itself. It was a tedious, rather boring and slow game which couldn't

Loki was a boring copy of Diablo 2 with a bad storyline and gameplay.

I hope i'm wrong but I'm afraid I ain't.

this site seems to think that it will be more then one game.

I didn't catch that in the release wheni read it, but they seem to think it....

I think it would make sense if the game is somehow like the elder scrolls (Oblivion, morrowind...) series . Obilvion had a big continent too and a lot of minor and major quests to follow. For an RPG game i expect some storyine which isn´t fully covered in the books- could be the story of a renown kingsguard charachter or maybe some more details about the age of Aegon II. and Robert´s rebellion or something like that. Wouldn´t it be a cool thing for a PC game if you could learn more e.g. about Eddard´s promise (to Lyanna) ?

I´m also crossing my fingers for a non- MMO.

Elder Scrolls/Oblivion was my idea of what would be a perfect fit. Something open ended, that gives you some exposure to characters and events from the book and maintains the flavor of Westeros without having to always been treading on the toes of the canon.

Play as some sort of Hedge Knight, Free Cities Rogue, Asshai, etc. All the "generic" archetypes are there, and you could get creative with your own character creation.

The aSoIaF RPG book might be a good basis for the building blocks for such a game. Don't know anything at all about the studio doing this... but it looks like it might be too limited in resources/money/time to really do it justice unfortunately. Here's crossing my fingers I'm proven wrong. (Also, just say no to MMO!)

Well, if they also gave you the option to play a member of the Night's Watch, it could be really cool. That's actually one setting where there are encounters, and even a large goal to work up to (taking down one of Mance's co-leaders, for example--and lack of a better term).

That would be awesome actually. Fighting Wildings, Wargs, Giants, Wights, and Others. Collecting items of the first men, what happened with the Children of the Forest, etc. It would be a very cool setting. Because the Night's Watch take anyone you could still have various backgrounds, thief, noble, soldier, etc. as well as having different "Racial" stats based on your birthplace in the 7 kingdoms.

I could see it possibly working in the context of a Oblivion type game, a little more so with a game like Mount and Blade, if it was fleshed out. But what i think would work best is if they did it like the Total War series. That would be ideal to me.

Personally I really hope that content-wise it will be more of a 'Baldur's Gate' game than Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights (or similar to 'The Witcher' I loved that one), finishing the Baldur's Gate thrilogy felt like saying goodbye to close friends, Neverwinter Nights was a bit of a let-down for me after that...

I really hope they explore as fully as possible the story and don't stint on character development (in case it wasn't obvious I'm not an 'action' player ;-) ).

RJM said:

If it's anything like Oblivion, you can count me in. I'd lose my life to that game even more so then i did to Oblivion.

If it's a MMO I'd most likely not play it. But anything else, hell, even a puzzle game I'd prolly play lol.

I noticed today on GRRM's not-a-blog that he gave a few more details about the contract with Cyanide Studios:

1) They're targeting two games, not one: an RPG and an RTS.

2) They're targeting both consoles and PCs.

3) They're aiming for release in summer of 2011.

Of course, at this stage of development all published statements are just goals and hopeful thinking...

an RTS....wtf...

dunno if i'm going to liek that one.

Lars said:

Actually, that could be pretty cool.

Baldur's Gate = Masterpiece... i have also the T-shirt ;-)

Gualdo said:

Me too! I'd also love the philosophical angle of Planescape: Torment but that could be a bit too much for ASOIAF.