All For One: The poster for Season 4 of "The Wire" 

It's often been said that the foundation of any successful relationship is trust. The founders of BioWare and Pandemic have made it clear in interviews that they trust Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, whom they know well from his days as a managing director of their previous owner, Elevation Partners. But as they are being slowly assimilated into the Borg the EA empire, we wondered, how might they quickly develop similar faith in the rest of their new colleagues? There are any number of bonding exercises that could do the trick: a weekend paintball retreat; a long night of drinking and Rock Band; standing up on a chair and falling backwards into the welcoming arms of their fellow studio general managers. But what better way to build trust than for BioWare Pandemic to collaborate with a slew of existing EA studios on a brand new IP? This is the subject of today's "An Immodest Proposal."

Our game concept is ripped from yesterday's headlines, or rather a Wired.com piece that several blogs picked up on last year, titled "Sims Designer Had the Wright Stuff for Street Racing Way Back When." Inspired by the documentary "32 Hours 7 Minutes," the story centers around the revelation that Sim City creator Will Wright once held the record for an illegal cross-country race from Brooklyn, NY to Santa Monica, CA. Like many of you, we had no idea that Wright was once fast or furious. But we saw in the combination of this story, EA's wealth of studio talent and the persona of Wright himself the potential for the company's next great videogame franchise. Still, with the company having suffered a black eye in recent years for some of its labor practices, and the street watching its headcount like a aerie of hawks, we don't suggest that EA overwork its teams or add more people to tackle this. Instead, we'd dream big and urge EA to borrow a page from Google and let everyone at the company spend one day a week working on a project of their own choosing. Or, in this case, our own choosing--for the sake of corporate harmony.

Now, on to the project.

Our concept is Midnight Express: an open-world, cross-country racing game set in the year 2010, 30 years after Wright's victory. The protagonist would be a junior programmer on the still-in-development Spore who's under house arrest for illegal street racing. When the lead programmer goes AWOL to NYC for a hush-hush meeting with rival publisher Ubivision--just as the game is preparing for its gold master debut at E3 2010--Wright asks the hero to take his top secret race car, drive out to NYC, pick up the lead programmer, and bring them back to finish the game before the CEO finds out that anything is amiss. After a short prologue/tutorial mission in NYC, the game proper begins with our hero and their passenger driving from Brookyn to Santa Monica, guided along the way by Wright hacking into various satellites, security cameras, police radios and other elements of the country's security grid; aided by a loose network composed of fans of Wright's games; trying to stay one step ahead of the cops, the Feds, homeland security, and a group of rogue publicists from Ubivision who will stop at nothing to prevent Spore from winning the Game Critics Award for Best of Show--again.

To create Midnight Express, various EA studios would throw in their tech and expertise; a videogame potluck of sorts. We'd use Criterion's Burnout: Paradise tech as the foundation of the new title: a no-loading, open world streaming engine, 60 frames per second, gorgeous. EA Canada, the studio that handles the Need For Speed series, would provide its licensed car models, vehicular customization and the police AI from Need For Speed Most Wanted. The AI for Ubivision's rival racers would come from DICE's Xbox 1-era Rallisport series; DICE would also take care of the countryside and off-road map designs. (We haven't forgotten the Wii and DS; EA's Salt Lake City studio will handle the Wii and DS spinoffs, which will feature a young Will Wright--think early Harry Potter--in a caRPG that draws inspiration from Kingdom Hearts and Mario Kart.)

What about the new studios? BioWare will handle the writing for all of the games, with particular focus on the various side missions that our hero must accomplish before getting back on the road. Pandemic, meanwhile, will take care of both co-op play--piloting the plane flying overhead to scout obstacles and opponents--and the vehicular combat downloadable mission packs, which will chronicle the escalating battle between EA and Ubivision during E3 (Hot Gold Nights), Leipzig (Autobahn Assault) and Tokyo Game Show (Ronin Thunder). And finally, if the game is as big a hit as we think it can be, EA Mythic could resurrect the code from EA's doomed Motor City Online and The Sims Online as the basis for the inevitable Play 4 Free MMO, World of Wright. Because nothing brings game developers together like building another billion-dollar franchise.