When The Mummy came out in 1999, it turned out to be a huge hit in the box office (although it gave me perpetual nightmares about scarabs crawling under my skin). Following on that success, The Scorpion King hit theaters in 2001 with similar success, with yet another sequel in 2008 hitting number 1 on the box office for opening day (beating out The Dark Knight on opening day). I purchased Tomb of the Dragon Emperor back during a Black Friday sale and decided to watch it today, having not opened it since purchase.
So imagine my surprise when I see that Bigpoint is making an MMO surrounding The Mummy. The Mummy Online is a free-to-play browser MMO in the works for release this Winter, and Bigpoint sees plenty of opportunity in this:
“We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with The Mummy film franchise,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games. “The action-packed story of Egyptian mythology and 1930’s fortune hunters provides a great backdrop for our team to build an awesome online game experience.”
Built on the Unity engine, The Mummy Online will be a 3D MMO, likely similar to Free Realms or Fusion Fall. Now I know what you’re thinking; “Omali! The Mummy series hasn’t been relevant since 2002. This will bomb!” You might be correct, after all, were the title not free-to-play. One of the issues that crashed The Matrix Online was that the game was delayed so long that the fervor of the original movie had died to the painful failures of the sequels and, by then, very few wanted a Matrix MMO. With The Mummy Online being free to play and browser based, several initial barriers are removed.
That is to say, there is nothing preventing this from being a cheap pull to an IP that was popular a few years ago, but we’ll see about that when it launches.
More snooping around Hollywood’s garbage cans for MMO IPs as they appear. I hope Brendan Fraser is an NPC.
MMO Fallout 