Most licensed mobile games never tell you who wrote them. Transformers: Eternal War puts the name at the top of its store listing.

The game arrives on 12 November. Apple’s listing is already taking preorders and reads “Expected Nov 12, 2026”, free, with in-app purchases, and it carries a 9+ rating with advisories for loot boxes and mild cartoon violence. Apple gives the seller as Hoolai Game Limited; Google Play carries the same game under Wanda Cinemas Games, refreshed its listing on 15 October, and, unlike Apple’s page, says that it contains ads. The official channel put a trailer up on 16 October, titled “Transformers: Eternal War officially launches on November 12!”

Both storefronts share one description. Its first feature section is headed “Forge an Original Transformers Epic with Simon Furman”, which puts the writer ahead of combat, ahead of squad building, ahead of the base that soaks up most of the play time. The copy under that heading calls him “the legendary writer who helped define the Transformers universe for generations of fans.” The sections that follow are about systems. The one at the top is about a man who last wrote a Transformers comic for IDW.

The game is selling the writer before it sells the game.

The story he has written for it is an original one. Earth has been eaten by a corruption born out of chaos energy, an apocalyptic faction called the Chaos Legion rises out of that corruption, and the Autobots and Decepticons have to choose between carrying on with their own war and standing together against something worse. The official key visual puts Optimus Prime and Megatron shoulder to shoulder, weapons out, facing purple-lit versions of their own kind, under the line STAND AS ONE.

Which is the premise Furman built his name on. Target: 2006 began in the Marvel UK weekly in September 1986. Galvatron, Cyclonus and Scourge arrive from twenty years in the future, Optimus Prime is out of the picture, and the Autobots end up working alongside Megatron because the alternative is worse. That serial turns forty this autumn. We still reach for it first when we argue that the British book was the better one! Handing the same shape back to the same writer might be a nice piece of casting, but it might as easily be a safe one, and there is no telling which until the game is out.

One caution on the date, because this one has already moved. Notebookcheck reported on 3 September that Eternal War would launch globally on 15 September for iOS and Android, citing the game’s own pre-registration page, after a soft launch earlier in the year in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines. That date came and went, but the App Store listing still reads Preorder today. This is the second date the game has published for itself.

Pre-registration is still open, and the sign-up reward is Jazz and Bumblebee. [2]

Furman’s name on the front of a free-to-play game is worth something, and our own Marvel UK archive and IDW archive are largely built out of his work. But whether it is worth anything inside an idle RPG [1] whose own copy promises that the fighting carries on while the player is offline is a different question. The answer arrives on 12 November.

[1] The game cannot settle on what to call itself. Both storefront descriptions say Strategy RPG, Apple files it under Role Playing and Strategy, Google Play files it under Role Playing, and the official site’s own page metadata describes it as “a new idle RPG adventure mobile game”. The description’s third section, the one about the Ark, is pure idle game: offline resource generation, automated production, “a seamless hands-off experience”.

[2] Rendered on the pre-registration page as “Jazz & Bumble”, which is a translation artefact rather than a new character.

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