Circle Studio, the British developer founded by many of the former Core Design team, which was effectively disbanded after Tomb Raider's failings last year, have revealed that their debut title will utilise Criterion's Renderware engine - as used most famously by GTA, and other big-name titles. The hope is that shipping-in this middleware from outside will help lighten the load on the team as they aim to kick-start Circle's gaming career with two releases on the and in 2005.

"The is not about technology any more - it's about creativity," beamed MD Jeremy Heath-Smith (former board member at Eidos). "Our philosophy as a developer is to concentrate on creativity, gameplay and content - the elements that truly add value to individual titles and ultimately the industry as a whole as higher quality games are delivered to market." How very noble of him.

Heath-Smith continued: "In order to achieve this we cannot afford to continually chase technology and reinvent the wheel for every game or format we work on. Outsourcing technology to Criterion, who have spent hundreds of man-years of R&D on generating the very best core technology, means we immediately have a robust framework in place on which we can engineer our own technologies specifically designed to drive the uniqueness and originality of our titles."

Hopefully we'll have something on Circle's games soon.

By Luke Guttridge