Director Roland Emmerich hates Earth. This we know; it’s why so many of his movies feature the planet under attack by aliens, Godzillas, moons, and so forth. But it appears his frustration with not being able to properly destroy the planet is getting to him, because Emmerich is going to space… specifically Space Nation, his new sci-fi multimedia project.
Joining forces with a few of the folks behind the massively popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, Emmerich wants Space Nation to be a TV series, a video game, and a series of animated shorts. To do so, he’s managed to raise $US50 ($69) million, a truly astounding amount given that his latest film, Moonfall, ended up only making half of its budget back. Here’s pretty much everything we know about the franchise — specifically the game — courtesy of Deadline:
“It will start as [a] massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), where players assume the roles of ship captains, embarking on an epic journey to unravel the mysteries of the Telikos Cluster and immerse themselves in the unfolding grand space opera. The game is set in a universe inhabited by alien species and driven by three main factions with distinct ideologies and goals.”
Uh-huh. If this smells familiar to you, you might be (vaguely) remembering Syfy’s Defiance, which tried much the same thing to limited success. Impressively, the show managed to last three seasons while the MMO inexplicably lasted from 2013-2021, but the franchise never achieved the popularity to capture the zeitgeist. And it had a good name, unlike the incredibly non-evocative Space Nation.
Apparently, the video game will enter alpha testing this August, and have an official release in the spring of next year. Goodness only know when the TV series will start production, let alone air. But the biggest question is this: will you care?