Electronic Arts announced as Brutal Legend publisher

Despite a lot of people dismissing Electronic Arts as a potential publisher of Brutal Legend after an earlier story about comments from the company’s CEO, it looks like the industry mega-giant is taking the game on after all.

The game’s official website at brutallegend.com is now redirecting to a non-existent page on EA’s servers, brutallegend.ea.com (you can see a screenshot of this error on the right). You will also find a button linking to this page on the sidebar of Double Fine’s Brutal Legend mini-site.

This domain change only seems to have been made today — it previously redirected to Sierra Entertainment’s old site — and a new post on the official Double Fine blog further bolsters the evidence of an imminent full-blown announcement.

At this point it seems fair to conclude that Electronic Arts is publishing Brutal Legend, and that a new site hosted by EA will be going up later today. Thanks to Nappi for pointing this one out.

Update

[December 12th, 2008 at 1:05pm GMT] And just over an hour later, it’s official: Electronic Arts is publishing Brutal Legend! Check out the new official site, which is little more than a splash page for now but undoubtedly be filled out following the gameplay demonstration on Sunday.

Update #2

[December 12th, 2008 at 1:16pm GMT] I’ve just received a press release from EA detailing the deal further. According to EA’s David DeMartini:

“Brutal Legend is shaping up to be a creative tour de force. At EAP, we are deeply committed to giving the industry’s elite independent developers a platform to launch their creations to a worldwide audience. Tim Schafer is known for some of the richest stories and characters in our industry, and with Jack Black offering his vocal styling’s for Eddie Riggs, we are extremely excited to help Tim and his talented team at Double Fine see their vision come to fruition.”

Brutal Legend has been given a new release schedule of Autumn/Fall 2009, which is one year beyond the original date — plenty of time for Double Fine to fine-tune their baby to sweet pefection, I guess. It’s still slated for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 only at this time.