Last week, Marvel and game publisher, Gazillion Entertainment, announced plans for a free-to-play Marvel Universe massively-multiplayer online game. In development for PCs, Marvel Universe will let users play as actual Marvel characters, and is being worked on at Secret Identity, a newly-established studio created specifically to work on the game.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Jeff Lind, studio director of Secret Identity, touched upon where the studio’s staff comes from. Lind himself has worked at Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment and Flagship Studios in the past.
Lind says that the staff of Secret Identity were handpicked by him and the company’s president, Dave Brevik. “It’s obviously been people we’ve worked with before in the past and some new folks,” he said. “There’s a little bit of Blizzard North blood in us, but also a nice healthy dose of other people from the Bay Area and others.”
He later added: “I’ve pulled people from the obvious sources and some of the non-obvious sources. I have designers from Wizards of the Coast. I have folks from Sony. I have folks from the obvious Bay Area [studios and] other places.”
Lind also touched upon the fact that Marvel Universe will let you play as Marvel’s characters themselves, rather than player-created avatars. When questioned as to how Secret Identity were accommodating this goal, however, he declined to give a concrete answer.
“I have such a great answer that I cannot give you right now,” Lind stated. “I have described this game to our execs and our investors and our partners like Marvel, and this is absolutely the first question I get every time. I think we have a nice answer to it, and is nothing I can talk about right now, but I can totally understand why you’re talking about that.”
