MGM Interactive and Worlds Inc of San Francisco are to collaborate on a multi-user game built around the popular television series, The Outer Limits. Created and produced by Trilogy Entertainment Group and Atlantis Films Ltd, The Outer Limits is to be streamed into an on-line game using Worlds’ three-dimensional virtual world software, World Chat. Worlds’ speciality is the ‘avatar’ – a three-dimensional digital personality which occupies space in the virtual world on the player’s behalf. Ken Locker, Worlds’ vice-president of Worlds, pronounced MGM Worldwide Television’s series a perfect property to introduce multi-user, avatar-based on-line gaming, the show’s eerie plot lines and bizarre characters making it an ideal vehicle for using Worlds’ unique software to bring an intriguing virtual reality experience to net users around the world. Worlds claims the game will support up to 5,000 users playing simultaneously and although all that is new about this is the number of players – British Telecommunications Plc’s multi-user game, Wireplay, which pilots in January will immediately support 1,500 players and upgrading is only a matter of adding new hardware – MGM’s participation is sure to push The Outer Limits game into the public eye. Worlds claims the number of users will increase further by the end of 1996. Worlds will provide artistic direction and technical game play. Game designers Jeff Sullivan and Bruce Onder will head the design team. Marketing and distribution will be handled by MGM/UA Home Entertainment. At the Siggraph show in Los Angeles in August, IBM Corp and Worlds demonstrated their own breed of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, VRML+, which is a jointly proposed extension to the emerging standard. Both firms plan to begin distributing a free VRML+ browser by the end of the month.
