A Marvel MMO Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Cryptic Studios, producers of the popular superhero MMORPGs City of Heroes and City of Villains, have teamed up with Microsoft and Marvel to produce the first massively multi-player online game set in the Marvel Universe for the XBox360 and the PC (a hat-tip goes to Zen of Design via NerfBat for reporting it). This seems odd as Cryptic was being sued by Marvel for copyright infringement not long ago. Marvel claimed that because the game allowed players to create characters much like Marvel's, Cryptic's game had "disrupted 'existing and future' business prospects for licensing its characters in video games". Now, however, it looks like they've made nice-nice. I wonder how much leverage that lawsuit provided Marvel as they muscled their way into the market.

As my WoW-addicted friends can tell you, I don't play MMORPGs. I have other addictions to waste my time with. But I am a sucker for superheroes. I collected X-Men and The New Mutants all the way through High School and played every superhero RPG I could get my hands on, starting with the old-school yellow box Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game, then Villains and Vigilantes (I played a game of V&V as a pre-teen at day camp with Tom Dowd, who later created Shadowrun), Champions, and DC Heroes. If the game is good, and I can create my own superhero and go clobbering bad guys in the name of truth and justice and all that, I may just have to change my tune.

You can read Cryptic Studios' press release here.

Also, for anyone who is a fan of the original Marvel RPG, you have to check out ClassicMarvel.com: an online version of the entire ruleset for the classic Marvel Superheroes RPG, including both the basic and advanced rulesets, and all of the contents of the Ultimate Powers Book and Realms of Magic supplements!