Gazillion Gets Ten Year Marvel MMO Deal
If there’s one golden rule in comic books, it’s got to be that if you don’t see the body (and a lot of times even if you do), they’re not really dead. So, it should come as no surprise to comic fans that the previously canned Marvel Comics MMO game has come back from that dead. And in true comic book fashion, it looks like it’ll be a brand new face under the familiar looking costume.
Late last night, word broke that newly named MMO development studio, Gazillion Entertainment, would officially announce today that it has signed a ten-year agreement to develop and publish MMO games using the Marvel Comics stable of characters. You might remember it was only a couple of years ago that Marvel was working with Cryptic Studios and Microsoft on an MMO title, before Microsoft and Marvel had a falling out and Cryptic decided instead to take what it had built for the scrapped project and do its own thing with Champions Online. Under the new deal with Gazillion, Marvel fans will get another shot to play in the Marvel sandbox with not one, but two new upcoming MMO releases based on the comic universe. The first, currently in development by casual MMO studio The Amazing Society, will be the kid-friendly Marvel Super Hero Squad MMO, which will be based on the popular Marvel toy line/comic book and the upcoming cartoon of the same name. Meanwhile, elsewhere in this ongoing story arc, newcomer Gargantuan will be hard at work developing an MMO for the mainstream Marvel stable with Marvel Universe.
While the news of all of these projects coming from one brand new company might seem a bit surprising, there’s an easy explanation: a secret identity. While Gazillion Entertainment might have only just started operating as Gazillion this week, the company has already been hard at work for some time now under a different guise. See, until this week, the company was operating as NR2B Research, and was working behind the scenes through its in-house studios: The Amazing Society, SmartyCard, Slipgate Ironworks, NetDevil, and now Gargantuan. NetDevil, you may recall, has already made a name for itself in the MMO world with Jumpgate Evolution and the upcoming LEGO Universe MMO.
The timing for the development of a new Marvel Universe MMO couldn’t come at a more opportune time for Marvel. With the continued success of NCsoft popular superhero MMO, City of Heroes, as well as the upcoming release of both Cryptic and Atari’s Champions Online and Sony Online’s upcoming DC Universe Online game, comic books are apparently the next big MMO genre for those getting burnt out on the likes of World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. Plus, Marvel’s cast of unique characters are going to be squarely in the spotlight over the next few years, thanks to a host of upcoming Marvel-based films, including Spider-Man 4, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Iron Man 2, The First Avenger: Captain America, Thor, and The Avengers, all due to hit the big screen between now and the end of 2011.
In other words, for gamers, it looks like it’s a good time to be a comic book fanboy.
