If Science Fiction has taught me anything, it is that when you find yourself in a spacesuit, on a distant and shattered world, shining a flashlight through the ruins of an alien civilisation obviously far more advanced than your own at it’s height, and you come across a big tomblike chamber in which stands a single solitary lever/button/box/coffin/crystal/etc, covered in strange writing and surrounded by alien skeletons, and murals of alien skeletons, LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE!
I just thought I’d get that gem of advice in now, in the hope that it’ll sink in, because if the people imagining our future are any kind of guide, we as a species, are in big trouble, largely because we seem destined for the role of ‘Peaceful Explorers’, and as such are going to be inadvertently causing the galaxy a whole heap of trouble with our ignorant curiosity.
Ranting which gains relevance because of this news:
Gateworld: MGM announces Stargate MMORPG (via Slashdot)
...and there was much ‘Doh!’
Quick rundown then: Stargate was an enjoyable one-off action sci-fi romp, involving all the usual good stuff; plucky Amercian heroes, evil alien super-beings, rebel uprisings, neat winged attack spaceships, a nuclear bomb countdown and hyeirogyphics, and basically had a lot of fun with the popular speculation that the ancient Egyptians had help from space aliens. Our guys went in, liberated the savages, killed the evil alien overlord and came home heroes!
It should have ended there really, but instead was turned into a long-running and unfeasibly popular TV show, with MacGyver as Kurt Russel, and which charted the obvious serial potential of an interconnected system of teleporters linking various strange worlds with our own.
I’m a huge fan, but mostly by way of morbid curiosity, as week after week, I’d stare slack-jawed as our ambassadors to the stars manage to blunder through catastrophe after catastrophe, most of which only manage to avoid destroying the Earth through undeserved luck.
I’ve seen a few series now and been fascinated as ‘SG-1’, the elite best of the best, led by MacGyver, have managed to enrage several technologically superior alien civilisations, destroy or otherwise damage at least three stars, connect the Earth to a black hole, introduce a good baker’s dozen of killer space viruses to Earth, become possessed by evil alien ghosts at on average at least three times each, (sometimes twice in one week), destroy, forget, lose or otherwise render useless countless useful alien devices and technologies and wreck, destabilise, taint and throw into pandemonium more alien societies than you can shake a stick at, having a Prime Directive mostly of ‘uuuuuuuh...what?’. And those are good days – the episodes involving time travel and parallel universes really hurt.
Despite all this, the now familiar performance review visits from Pentagon Officials which seem to happen every sixth episode (a gratuitous excuse for a flashback episode), STILL sees the SG project not shut down for the good of all mankind! How could this situation possibly be made worse? Easy…they could send you and me!
The news of a Stargate MMORPG is quite a bolt out of the blue, considering that an offline Stargate game was planned, but had been bogged down in legal wrangling for years before being recently buried for good:
Gamezone: Stargate News - 5/8/05
And that was that. This new project seems different, although this whole ‘Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment’ outfit sounds woolly; named after the fictional military base in the show, from where the Stargate muppets sally forth, and seems to have been created purely for this job; it has no history, no past experience, no previous games, and currently seems to have a lot of vacancies. The management listed has previous credits such as Earth and Beyond, Shadowbane and Matrix Online, although they do have the Art Director for most of Blizzard’s past games on board, so that’s something at least. It does rather seem like the kind of game I’d get a tremendous amount of glee being Community Manager for though.
Clearly it’s far too early to tell if this has a chance, or whether this is just a speculative venture capitalist thing, but certainly the franchise has the potential to be at least, if not more, popular than the upcoming Star Trek MMO, or Star Wars: Galaxies, although we’ve seen that film/movie tie-in MMOs in general don’t seem to do as well as wholly independent offerings. As for gameplay, etc…who knows at this stage, but this might well be one to watch…