Tag: The mummy Online

The Mummy Online Shutting Down Today


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There are teenagers today who were not alive when The Mummy first released, yet have enough sense to tell you what a horrible idea licensing the franchise was for a video game, let alone an MMO. Even 2010 Omali, a pea-brained simpleton who believed anything was viable with enough heart, thought that this was a bad idea. No, The Mummy Online was most likely conceived in the same fashion as many dying properties. Someone decided to jump on board the train, figuring it had one good run left in it before the franchise was worthless, or the creators were willing to sell it out for pennies on the dollar in the hopes that maybe someone would pay attention and remember that they exist.

And much like its film counterpart, The Mummy Online went directly to the bottom of the bargain bin, never to be seen again. The beta servers went live on December 7th, 2011 and the last content update rolled out March 16th, 2012, giving the game a life cycle of three months from public access to maintenance mode. After a good year and a half of the game acting as a digital dust collector, Bigpoint will finally pull the plug today.

As you will have noticed during the past few months, there have been less and less players online to play with and no new features have been added to the game recently. This is why we’ve decided to put more effort into the games that already have a large active fan base, and make them even more awesome with the resources we have.

While we’re on topic, I’m looking for a beta invite to that Milli Vanilli MMO if anyone has a key to spare.

(Source: Bigpoint)

Bigpoint Invokes MC Escher In Concept Art


Click on the image above to see a larger version, and follow these simple steps: Starting at the room in the northwest corner, move your finger down the hallway to the large room. Head down the first flight of stairs, down the second flight of stairs, and down the third flight of stairs. Now head around the bend, through the archway, and find yourself on the same level as you started from, while remaining walking on a flat surface.

I need to lie down, my brain hurts.

Pottermore, Tribes, and Lessons From The Matrix Online…


The Matrix Online was a great concept, not only because it took the living world presented in the film and transformed it onto a virtual medium that looked and felt a bit like City of Heroes, but because it presented a way to continue the series rather than simply flesh out a never-ending point in the middle of the movies. Whenever I talk of The Matrix Online, I’m obligated to point out that one of the shortcomings of the game was that it was released after the final two movies, when reception of the franchise was rather low.

I was in the process of talking about the long-forgotten Harry Potter MMO when I heard about Pottermore, an upcoming “service” that may or may not be the game we heard talk about dating as far back as the release of Goblet of Fire (and probably even further back). My original topic, which I am replanting here, was whether or not a Harry Potter MMO could release in time to capture the interest in the franchise. Then it struck me, the Harry Potter IP is massive enough that such a question is irrelevant. Unless the game is terrible, there is no reason to assume that reception would be lackluster because of disinterest in the IP. So this topic is no longer about Harry Potter.

Instead, let’s talk about some of the other games that were announced over the past year that would warrant more concern. First in line, I want to talk The Mummy Online, announced one year ago, because I know I’m not the only one who was not only surprised that the franchise warranted enough interest to create a game, but that the series was still running (The Scorpion King 3 releases this December). There is also the issue of translating the franchise into a game, done once before with rather poor results. That being said, The Mummy Online still has a good chance of finding its niche, given a low barrier of entry (free to play game).

To further this topic, I’d like to travel back in time to a game that hasn’t seen light since 2004: Tribes. With Tribes, I only need to say one word to get the fans rallied to plaster this page with graffiti: Vengeance. If the Tribes MMO launches this year, as hoped, the series will have been inactive for seven years. That’s long enough for most of the remaining community to have lost interest in any reboot of the franchise, although time will tell if that is indeed the case.

So we’ll see if some of these old-name IP’s are strong enough to stand the test of time.

Just What I Wanted: The Mummy Online


Our shared expression...

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.