The quote’s from this GigaOm story on Marvel and Cryptic’s new found mutal appreciation society. Marvel caused a bit of a stir a couple of years ago when it sued Cryptic Studios for copyright infringement because its superhero online game City of Heroes (they also do City of Villains) allowed users to customise their avatars so they were too similar to Marvel superhero franchises. Anyway, they settled and now, Cryptic have been hired by Marvel to create the “Marvel Universe Online” (you can now download a trailer). Shall be interesting to see how they manage to resolve the dilemma that not everyone can be Spiderman or Magneto (I imagine you can only have one of each character per server). The GigaOm mentioned the Star Wars Galaxies flop, but that actually had more potential in that playing a jedi is theoretically pretty cool in itself, you don’t have to be Luke Skywalker. Maybe the Marvel Universe Online will involve playing archetypes based on the original characters, so you can have spiderman’s powers but be able to tweak the costume, that could very well appeal. I’d play the demo anyway.

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