Many of the developers with Phosphor Games are refugees from Midway Chicago. Part of the team at Midway Chicago was working on an open-world action game that was called Hero. With sale of Midway Chicago to Warner Bros., the team working on Hero lost all of the code and everything else that has been developed so far for the title.

When a number of developers from the Hero team left Midway Chicago they formed a new studio which is called Phosphor Games. These developers liked the Hero concept and where the development was going so much that they decided to create a new title that has become the spiritual successor of Hero.

Because the developers from Phosphor had nothing from Hero to work with, they had to build this new title from scratch. This new title is called Awakening, and Chip Sineni is hopeful that Awakening will find a publisher so that it can get into the hands of players. While the studio has been talking with a number of publishers, they don’t have a deal for Awakening yet.

Awakening does not have any connection to the old Midway code or story, but it does retain some of the cool ideas and concepts that the team was working on. While Phosphor was not really ready to start taking about the title yet, there seems to be so much misinformation floating around the studio needed to address it. Despite the rumors, the title is not even close to finished, and it does not currently have a publishing deal (as explained above), but they are working on it as well as some other projects.

While Phosphor apparently did some work for Microsoft on Kinect Adventures, it is still unknown what beyond Awakened the studio might be working on at the moment.