Firefly

Browncoat Spirit - Corey Bridges

Oh, sure, I called myself a Browncoat before. But when we announced that Multiverse and Fox are partnering to choose an independent development team to create a Firefly MMO, that’s when I experienced true Browncoat spirit.

Everyone on the Multiverse team is a Firefly fan, a Browncoat. Myself, I blinked and missed the show when it was on TV in 2002, but uber-engineer Jeff Weinstein (famous, of course, to many of our developers as HuggyBear9000) lent me the DVDs a couple years ago. I was floored, naturally. And I was sad-very sad that I couldn’t visit the ’Verse after that handful of episodes. The spinoff Serenity movie (which Multiverse saw en masse, shutting down the company for the day) helped a bit, but I, like millions of other fans, wanted more. I wanted to return to the ’Verse...

Being eyeball-deep in the virtual world industry as we are, lunchtime conversations at Multiverse sometimes circle back to recurring topics like "What TV show would make a great MMO?" (Other hot topics: "Quien es mas macho: William Shatner or Chuck Norris?" and the nearly fistfight-inspiring "skill-based systems or class systems?") Anyway, the most frequent answer to the TV MMO question has been Firefly. Joss Whedon created an incredibly rich and compelling setting, a setting that he barely got the chance to show us. There’s so much left to see. So many stories to be told. And now, thanks to the MMO, thousands (millions?) of us won’t just watch those stories, we’ll create them ourselves in the game.

Speaking of millions of players, what does this mean for you, a developer on the Multiverse platform? Good things. A Firefly game will help bring even more players onto the Multiverse network, increasing the size of the market into which you’ll launch your virtual world.

Our plan was to announce the game at a Firefly convention in L.A. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the show had sold out weeks in advance, the event organizers mysteriously cancelled the convention the night before. But for Browncoats, the premature cancellation of something they love is just a speedbump, not a roadblock. After all, thanks to them, "the little show that could" became one of the all-time best-selling DVD sets at Amazon.com; and their dedication led, in 2005, to the big-budget theatrical release of Serenity. So they weren’t going to let a little thing like a cancelled convention hold them back.

Attendees took it upon themselves to immediately create a replacement show, the "Browncoats’ Backup Bash." Browncoats all over the world-even ones who weren’t going to the convention-began to donate money via PayPal so that the hundreds of attendees who already arrived at the hotel could still have a show. Actors from the Firefly series itself, stiffed by the original event’s organizers, volunteered to come to the replacement show and hang out with fans. The sheer will and creativity were downright inspiring.

We see that same never-say-die attitude in the developers building worlds on the Multiverse platform. We’ve now got 8,000 registered teams of independents who, before Multiverse, had been told that they’d never get to make the worlds they were dreaming of.

And as a startup with a crazy idea of enabling anyone to make a virtual world, we at Multiverse strive to live up to those examples of Browncoat spirit ourselves.

Don’t forget Mal’s dictum: "We’ve done the impossible, and that makes us mighty."

 Corey

Corey Bridges - Executive Producer, Multiverse