Marvel MMO restarted

Marvel has contracted with Gazillion Entertainment to publish a new MMO based on its stable of comic characters. Sound familiar? It should, since this is the second attempt by the comic giant to start a MMO based on its popular line of super heroes.

Back in 2006 Marvel made a lot of waves by suing Cryptic Studios, makers of City of Heroes, the only superhero based MMO in the market. The lawsuit alleged that City of Heroes had infringed on Marvel’s intellectual properties since the City of Heroes’ costume creator could replicate the design of a number of trademarked Marvel hero costumes.

Running around in City of Heroes back then as a player, I remember seeing a number of Wolverine, Spider-man and Hulk clones. Having names like xWolverinex or Sp1d3r-m4n, they were poor attempts at gaining notoriety. The clones didn’t last long. As soon as a GM saw them or another player reported them, they were ‘genericized’ or reduced back to the original starting costume template faster you could say “Hulk Smash!”  To be fair, it wasn’t just a Marvel problem as there were plenty of  Supermans and Batmans from DC running around too.

The lawsuit was eventually decided in favor of Crytpic with the judge pretty much saying that the City of Heroes costume creator was much like a pencil or a set of colored markers: just because a user could create a Marvel costume using such a tool didn’t mean that the tool in of itself was a trademark violation. It was only after the lawsuit ended did things get wacky, because soon afterwards, Marvel announced that it was developing its own superhero MMO and the developer would be, Cryptic Studios, the very game developer it had sued just months before.

This left Cryptic in an awkward situation. It was still the main developer of the City of Heroes game, which was published by NCSoft, but was now contracted by Marvel to produce the game’s direct competitor. Eventually, this would trigger a somewhat amicable parting of ways as NCSoft bought the rights to the City of Heroes franchise and brought a good chunk of the NCSoft City of Heroes staff in house. Cryptic was then free of any conflict of interest and could produce the competition in earnest.

However, that’s when things fell apart. I don’t remember all the details but Cryptic and Marvel struggled at getting along. It was a quite a reversal to see former enemies working so closely together, but it appeared that the old antagonisms hadn’t quite disappeared. There were all sorts of stories (not sure how much of it was true) of clashing egos, which both companies had aplenty, disagreements of how to interact with iconic Marvel characters (could a player play Thor or could all a player hope for is to be Thor’s sidekick?) and even arguments on which platform the game would target.

This led Marvel to cancel its relationship with Cryptic and then for Cryptic to buy up the intellectual property of the pen and paper role-playing game, Champions. The guts of Marvel Universe Online would eventually become Champions Online which will be released later this year.

Has Marvel resolved the issues which led to the failure of it's first MMO attempt?

This gets me back to Marvel and Gazillion Entertainment. Gazillion Entertainment is new. It’s a startup that before this announcement scarcely anybody had ever heard of. Gazillion in turn has contracted a San Mateo-based company called Gargantuan to develop the game. I’ve never heard of Gargantuan either, but apparently it’s full of ex-Blizzard, Cryptic, NCSoft and Sony employees. So there’s experience there, but no track record.

The timing is also interesting, since Marvel will now be entering a superhero MMO market that will become crowded. City of Heroes is still plugging along and it will soon be joined by both Champions Online and DC Universe Online. It’s ironic that Marvel Online will not only be the last superhero MMO to join this market but it will also be directly competing against the game that was at one point the previous incarnation of itself.

I also wonder if they’ve solved some of the problems which led to its break with Cryptic. In DC Universe Online, they’ve made the decision that you can’t play Superman, but can help Superman as a colleague or sidekick. They’ve also decided to target the PC and the Playstation platforms. Champions Online will be released first for the PC and will then be released for the Xbox 360.

No details about the game have yet emerged. I suspect, if the past is to be any judge, that we will see more dramatic twists and turns in the future.

Via Kotaku.

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