Monthly Archives: March 2009

Artifacts of roleplaying: the Marvel Super Heroes City Map

Published March 27, 2009

Roleplayers put a lot of stock in maps.

Maps can fire the imagination, make you see worlds in a way that description can’t. A good map of a fantasy world can supercharge your play experience, and take you into that world better than anything else. I think there’s a reason why the most popular request for Collector’s Edition items in MMOGs was always “a cloth map”.

Not all maps are of fantasy locations, however, and the map that made the greatest impression on my mind as a roleplaying teenager was this:

Marvel Super Heroes City Map (Basic Set)

The city map as seen in the original ‘yellow box’ of Marvel Super Heroes, from TSR in 1984.

No single item (with the probable exception of the map that came in the Advanced Set, two years later) had more of a jumpstart on my gaming than this map. I played endlessly on this thing, generating plotlines simply based off the names on the buildings. It came alone in the box, with no explanation, no attempt to define everything you’d find on it; in other words, your imagination was allowed to run wild. Continue reading →

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Rip van Rockjaw

Published March 24, 2009

A couple of years ago I worked with someone who was coming back into the (video) games industry after being out of it for over 10 years.

When I mean ‘out of it’, I mean it was like he’d lived in a cave for a decade. He hadn’t played key games; more than that, didn’t even know what they were.

It was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating to talk to him. Terrifying because he was in charge of some major product decisions; exhilarating because he came to everything with incredibly fresh eyes and intense new ideas. Needless to say he’s now blazing a trail somewhere.

I feel a little bit like that in relation to tabletop roleplaying today. Apart from the odd session here and there, almost always with an old system, I haven’t been properly aware of or up-to-date with the roleplaying industry since… probably 1994, when I was finishing university. Continue reading →

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Methods and madness

Published March 20, 2009

Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.

Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.

I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control. Continue reading →

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Variety gives me a gazil – okay, four more thoughts on Gazillion

Published March 19, 2009

While most of the gaming press pretty much shrugged and moved on regarding Gazillion (or in the case of some blogs, sneered – but hey, that’s what blogs usually do) Ben Fritz at Variety* did that crazy ‘journalism’ thing and got the right people on the phone to comment.

In the process, he discovered a whole bunch of new facts which are very interesting, and led me to some more thoughts. You absolutely should read the article, but I’ll pull out some corkers here:

1. Gazillion has eight ‘projects’ in the works.

Four we know about (LEGO Universe, Marvel Super Hero Squad, Marvel Universe, Slipgate Ironworks’ MMO) but that leaves four more they’re keeping under wraps. That’s pretty huge. Again to give you context, while at NCsoft there were usually half-a-dozen or more MMO projects in various stages of development in Korea, it was rare any of them were made public.

Right now, again by comparison, NCsoft has four MMOs in development that you know about (Guild Wars 2, Aion: The Tower of Eternity, Carbine Studios’ MMO, Blade & Soul) but I guarantee you more are under wraps. Continue reading →

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The new 800lb gorilla: Gazillion

Published March 17, 2009

If I had cornflakes to choke on, I might have done just that this morning. Big, big news:

Online game startup Gazillion Entertainment is announcing today a major partnership with comic book king Marvel Entertainment to build a series of online game worlds with Marvel’s comic book characters.

The first game is a kid-oriented online world based on brand-new Marvel property Super Hero Squad. This show for kids will debut on the Cartoon Network in the fall and the game will debut sometime in 2010. Gazillion, based in San Mateo, Calif., has already been working on it for a year.

Heretofore unknown, Gazillion is unveiling itself as one of the most ambitious game startups in the world. It has 300 employees and is squarely focused as a pure play company developing online game worlds for the mass market, with game projects based on Marvel, LEGO, and its own original properties. Continue reading →

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