mmog posts

38 Studios -- a new development house working on an MMO codenamed Copernicus -- announced today that award-winning artist Thom Ang has joined the company as Director of Art. Previously, Ang worked for THQ and Electronic Arts. The Medal of Honor series is among his credits.

38 Studios was founded by professional baseball player Curt Schilling -- an all-too-rare combination of jock and geek. The company is in the pre-production stages of development on a mysterious massively multiplayer game. The game's staff includes famed comic book artist Todd McFarlane and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. Not much else is known about the project at this point.

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.