Marvel Comics is suing Cryptic Studios and NCSoft (the makers and publishers of City of Heroes).
The grounds for this lawsuit? No, it’s not that Cryptic is lax in their duty renaming characters with similar names to established Marvel characters, but that the City of Heroes character builder allows players to create feel-a-like characters! Marvel is insisting, basically, that they have the rights to “big green strong guy” and “guy with claws and regeneration powers”. In other words, the City of Heroes character builder is TOO GOOD. What’s next, suing of Crayola because crayons can be used to draw characters that are too similar to Marvel’s?
Looking past this obviously meritless case to see why Marvel is really doing this is obvious: They’ve licensed their own MMORPG that will compete with City of Heroes and want to do as much damage to the incredibly successful competition as possible.
Fans of CoH have a petition online stating that they’ll be boycotting Marvel products including the upcoming Spiderman 2 DVD and the current X-Men Legends video game as well as their comics. I haven’t bought Marvel in quite a while, but I was thinking about picking up the X-Men title for the X-Box, and I’ll be willing to skip that to support them. Not buying the Spiderman 2 DVD would leave a serious hole in my collection so I make no promises there. I guess I’m half an activist…
You aren’t missing much. I rented X-Men Legends for the PS2 and it was really really bad. It’s basically Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, but with X-Men instead of clerics and necromancers, really bad graphics, and extremely buggy game play.
Parody article on BBspot: Marvel Sues Makers of Pens, Pencils
P.S. A preview option would be nice.