Bethesda Softworks, a ZeniMax Media company, and Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, announced today that Del Rey Books will publish a novel based on the upcoming RAGE video game. The novel, also entitled "RAGE", will be written by author and game writer Matt Costello and will release in North America on August 30, 2011. The novel will be published simultaneously in the UK and British Commonwealth by Ebury Publishing, part of the Random House Group.

RAGE is the latest game from id Software, the acclaimed designers of such classics as the Wolfenstein, DOOM, and QUAKE series. Eagerly awaited by the gaming community, RAGE is already being touted as one of the industry's most innovative first-person shooters, winning numerous awards at E3 2010.  Set in the not-too-distant future after an asteroid impacts Earth, you emerge into a vast wasteland to discover humanity working to rebuild itself against such forces as bandit gangs, mutants, and more.

The novel delves even deeper into this world and its characters through the pen of Matt Costello–the same person who helped write the story for the game. The world was doomed and only some of the population could be saved. That was what the scientists were saying, at least. So the best and brightest were gathered and put into stasis deep beneath the surface of the Earth–buried so that man could live.

When Lt. Nick Raine emerges from his Ark, he finds the human race has not been wiped out. And people, as resilient as they are, are scraping together a new world from the rubble of the old.  This was not what anyone in the Arks expected–a new society where might is right, mutants plague the Earth, and "friend" is a term for the person who hasn't stabbed you in the back.