Filed under: Culture, PC, MMO
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: 
Can a game spin off into a successful TV series?
Many of us still remember waking up early on Saturday mornings to catch the latest episode of
"Captain N: The Game Master" or rushing home after school to watch
"The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" (or if we were lucky enough to be watching on a Friday,
"The Legend of Zelda"). While these shows weren't exactly something to write home about, it was certainly exciting to see some of our favorite Nintendo characters come alive in the form of a cartoon. In the last few years the wildly popular
Pokemon games have spawned a long-lasting TV show and more recently, a
Viva Piñata TV series was launched side-by-side with the game, in what was a moderately successful cross-marketing strategy (the kid's show is still running today and the game posted slow but steady sales, developing somewhat of a cult following). Clearly, there's some
precedence for games to become the basis for a TV series, but these have all lacked one basic element that all the games required: interactivity.
So it is with some interest that the
LA Times reports that Sci-Fi channel is teaming up with Trion World Network to create (simultaneously!) an MMO and a TV show based on it. Sci-Fi channel president Dave Howe says that it's the "Holy Grail". A subscription-based MMO and a successful television series that are able to successfully leverage each other could certainly be a potential windfall. However, while the details are somewhat scarce at the moment, from what I can glean, there are some major hurdles that this joint venture will need to overcome.
Continue reading Counting Rupees: The MMO-TV hybrid
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