Recently we had a chance to try out The Thing via Entropia Universe, a movie tie-in to coincide with The Thing, in theaters October 14th. We asked Neverdie Studios’ Jon Jacobs a few quick questions about the game and his thoughts behind it. His answers read a little more like a press release to me, but nevertheless we appreciate his taking the time to answer my questions.
Are you going to be clearing up the issues with the Entropia launcher? I attempted to load the game several times to try it out but was unable to do so due to technical issues that I was unable to solve through several different means. I would hope you would aim for a much cleaner experience, especially with an ambitious project such as this one.
The Entropia Universe Platform is always working to smooth the registration and download process. In general it has come a long way especially for such an ambitious platform, but once in a while someone still hits a snag.
Why did you choose to go with an MMO rather than a stand-alone title? The Thing’s original video game adaptation was certainly passable — you could have tried to outdo it!
NEVERDIE Studios’ Virtual World ROCKtropia is a Pop Culture MMO and our main focus is adding more fun things for your avatar to do there. We thought that offering our existing players the chance to go to the Virtual Hyperplex Movie Theatre to literally step inside the movie The THING, would be a really exciting and memorable event, while at the same time we wanted to offer the THING fans who are unfamiliar with ROCKtropia the chance to download Hunt The THING as a stand alone title with an MMO component. So you could say we created a stand alone title within an MMO. Also We definitely didn’t want to try to outdo the original The THING game, we prefer to pay tribute to all that has gone before and add to The THING Universe.
If this bid is successful, are you thinking of expanding into other film arenas? Perhaps we could see more integrated campaigns with successful film franchises?
That is something we are really excited about and Universal definitely recognized that now is the first time it’s really possible to create a world class MMO to engage fans and create anticipation during the build up to a Theatrical release. I’m looking forward to taking it further with each new title.
Has there been talks of bringing this kind of experience to a console, where socialization could play a bigger role? Xbox Live and PlayStation Network users would eat this up.
It’s definitely on the cards to take ROCKtropia across multiple Platforms in the future, It would just be mind boggling for PC, Mobile, Xbox and PlayStation users to all converge inside a Virtual Movie Event, that would be huge.
If you could take any upcoming IP and turn it into an MMO, what would it be?
There’s so many, but 47 Ronin comes to mind immediately, the Samurai Lore is so rich, it’s perfect for a Movie Length MMO and if proves popular we could keep expanding on it.