Space Western brought to you by James Cameron’s ‘Multiverse.’

Those of us who like the “You got your Sci-Fi in my Western! / You got your Western in my Sci-Fi!” flavor of Joss Whedon’s Firefly like it a lot. It’s time for dancin’ then, to hear that the franchise is soon to be given new life as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, courtesy of MMO Creators Multiverse and Fox.

The world of Firefly — like many classic Western heroes — burned too brightly and died too young. After only 11 episodes and one movie, the series fell on hard times, and out of production — though not for lack of fan support.

While turning a fervent niche audience into profit is a difficult trick over network TV, Fox and Multiverse believe that MMO franchising could work a little differently. An interesting thing about Firefly is that it is not being released as a standalone MMO game — but rather as a marquee content showpiece in the larger world of “Multiverse”.

Multiverse is not an MMO – but rather an MMO engine designed as a sort of ‘browser’ for Multiverse-compliant game worlds. In the vein of “we don’t sell the cars, we just provide the infrastructure to drive them on,” the company intends to set itself up as a one-stop shop for gamers looking to explore multiple flavors of MMO gaming through a ‘STEAM-esque’ interface. Firefly will sit at the vanguard of the company’s launch, attracting potential customers with its recognizable brand.

MMOs are notoriously costly to develop, and only a small handful of them actually attract a decent enough user base to be profitable in the end. The purpose of Multiverse is to cut costs by providing aspiring developers with a plug-and-play engine for standardizing their world-building ideas. So far, support seems to be strong, with 7000 developers producing as many as 150 MMOs for the engine as we speak (according to WIRED online). A quick glance over at the upcoming roster list on the official Multiverse site lists no less than fourteen MMO titles in development for the system : everything from the Total Recall flavor of Project Mars to Frontier 1859 : An MMO set in the American pioneer days.

Interestingly, the brains behind Multiverse is none other than Aliens director James Cameron. Business Week ran a story about the Multiverse project not long ago which discussed Cameron’s plan to blur the line between Hollywood and gaming through “Project 880” — described in Cameron’s words as “completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi.” Project 880 was designed to be released as an MMO first, and then later transitioned to the big screen if the concept caught on with audiences. “We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world”, said Cameron. Presumably these narratives would take a shape more akin to TV or feature films.

Cameron’s not the only Hollywoodite getting into the MMO game either. Look for something called XQuest — a kind of reality-TV MMO hybrid — showing up eventually from Directors Ron Howard and Brian Grazer (the guys behind “24”) and Alex Seropian, one of the creators of HALO.

This trend of “experiment with virtual worlds, promote the popular ones to other forms of media” is certainly something new. It’s an interesting way for Hollywood to probe the popular consciousness while minimizing risk. Whether good games (or good TV) will be the ultimate result is anybody’s guess.
Source: gametab.com