inXile Trademarks Autoduel, Possible Sequel or Reboot in Development

Following the news that inXile Entertainment has opened a New Orleans-based studio comes a scoop from RPG Codex that the company has also recently trademarked the Autoduel title for “interactive video game programs”. This has led to speculation that a sequel or reboot to the 1985 vehicular CRPG Autoduel will be the project that the New Orleans team will be working on, along with some level design (at a minimum) for The Bard’s Tale IV:

The RPG Codex has been informed that the new studio will be staffed by a combination of new hires and existing inXile employees from California. Apparently, the government of Louisiana is providing very generous tax incentives. We’ve also been told that it’ll be at least a month before details can be provided on what the new studio will be developing. My first guess would be that the New Orleans studio will be working on level design for The Bard’s Tale IV, helping to achieve the high graphical bar inXile have aimed for at a lower cost. But according to a new interview at PC Gamer, inXile have “other production plans that we’ll be announcing soon that I think people will find very interesting”, so who knows what the future holds.

UPDATE: Oh boy, we’ve done it again! Codexer Jedi Master Radek, who discovered inXile’s Van Buren trademark last year, has just noticed that inXile trademarked the name Autoduel back in July. The original Autoduel, developed by Origin back in the 1980s, was a Mad Max-like “car RPG” based on the Steve Jackson Games tabletop property Car Wars. Brian Fargo is of course known for his love of Mad Max, having even been in negotiations to develop a Mad Max game at Interplay back in the 1990s, and what better time to announce the development of such a game than after the release of a successful Mad Max film? It seems like a reasonable bet that this is what the new studio is going to be working on.

UPDATE 2: The plot thickens! It turns out that inXile’s Maxx Kaufman was involved with an Autoduel Kickstarter project back in 2013 that ultimately failed. But that Autoduel was an online vehicular combat game, not an RPG. Is this going to be a second attempt at that, or a different thing altogether?

UPDATE 3: Returning to the original topic of this post, here’s an article at local news site NOLA.com that reveals some more details about the New Orleans studio. Apparently, a dozen inXile employees have agreed to move there, along with second-in-command Matt Findley who will be in charge. The article also appears to confirm that the new studio will be working on The Bard’s Tale IV, though of course that doesn’t mean it’s the only game they’ll be working on.

Interesting stuff. Give us a modern, Mad Max-inspired CRPG and I’ll buy it on day one.