[Beerhamut]

Yesterday I was swooning over my past adventures in EVE Online. I was blah blah-ing over the Whitewolf inspired sandbox game that never happened. And I got to thinking... Shadowrun... Catalyst Game Labs and CCP get together over some baked potatoes and Einstock beer, have a nice dinner, get a gooooood buzz on, and create something new and beautiful.

The players run everything. There are darker parts of the sprawl where player gangs run rampant and hold territory, craft illegal substances, and commit crime in the comfort of their own defenses, and higher class parts, where corp security forces keep a grip on things.

I want this.

I really really want it. Catalyst, it's time make a long distance call to Iceland.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

We had it, once.  Two of them even.  Seattle MUSH and Detroit MUSH

Players not only played but drove factions that are normally NPCs like gangs, organized crime, fixers, street docs, and etc. Cops and Corps were under control of the admins (too much power for players!), and of course there was a steady supply of shadowrunners looking to be hired to do everyone's dirty work.

[Beerhamut]

MUD style games are all good an fun, but imagine bringing the tech out of the 80s and into the twenty first century. 80s/90s retro style is on the rise, artists like Kanvinsky, and Com Truise are getting noticed. Games are already happening. Cyberpunk 2077 is shaping up to be huge in the single player market. Shows like Black Mirror and Altered Carbon are killing it. We have a second Blade Runner!!! The style is absolutely in the now, and now is the time to make Shadowrun reborn. Make an open world MMO with CCP. Do it now, and fill your coffers.

Fin

[Tecumseh]

I was a GM on Seattle MUSH, which is where I got this handle, oh, 25 years ago or whatever it was. I ran the NAN, Council Island, First Nations, etc.

There is/was an effort to code a 5E MUSH (Deep Shadows MUSH) that started about 4 years ago. Their last Twitter update (@deepshadowsmu) was 7 months ago, so who knows how active that is.

The video game licensing for Shadowrun is complicated, but the short version is that Microsoft holds the license for Shadowrun video games. (They've owned the electronic rights to Shadowrun since purchasing FASA Interactive 20 years ago.) No offense to Microsoft, but they're a lumbering beast and it takes a lot of nuyen to wake them up. It's entirely possible that Microsoft would be willing to license the electronic rights like they did to Harebrained and Cliffhanger, but it's no guarantee either. (Technically there might have been a middle step involving Microsoft licensing to Smith & Tinker first, then to Harebrained, but I'm fuzzy on that point.)

Also remember that Catalyst is just the publisher. The actual intellectual property of Shadowrun is owned by Topps. I don't fully understand where the IP lines are drawn, but I think you'd need Topps to sign off on anything involving the Shadowrun world/setting, and Catalyst to sign off on anything that references the rules or systems that Catalyst created. So now you have three parties at the table representing various components of Shadowrun IP, and you haven't even involved any video game developers or publishers yet. In theory Microsoft could develop it and publish it themselves, but there's a lot of inertia there. Plus there's probably the institutional memory that their 2007 Shadowrun first-person shooter didn't hit it out of the park (sales figures in the low six figures), so they're probably more interested in licensing than investing a ton of time and effort into it themselves. But that means you need a developer and/or a publisher at the table too, and things get complicated quickly.

(Wak or anyone who knows the inner workings better than I do, correct me on this.)

I'm not saying it can't be done; it can, and hopefully one day it will. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 will inspire Microsoft to dust off their IP and shop it around, but it's not as easy as Person A calling Person B and making a deal between two people.

[Michael Chandra]

And Shadowrun Chronicles had a bad start (in part due to garbage collection problems thanks to a typo) and never recovered from that, so Microsoft might be extra wary.

[Beerhamut]

Damn, there are a lot of people at that table. It's interesting that Microsoft holds a piece of this puzzle. On a whim the other day I looked up how much they paid for Minecraft.
If only something could show Microsoft the potential hype behind Shadowrun... I guess we just wait for C2077 and see what happens. Maybe I should write up a petition or even get something crowdfunded to help Catalyst buy up all the rights. I feel like this is the prime chance for it to happen.

I dunno... Thanks for the info .-.

[Beerhamut]

I did a little digging.
Paper: CGL-InMediaRes-Topps
Digital: Microsoft

Cliffhanger and NordicTHQ only designed and produced Shadowrun Chronicles. It looks like its still 100% Microsoft property

All we would need to do is get Microsoft's property into the hands of Topps. Since CGL has the license to paper, everything would be in one place. Microsoft to Topps. Right? so when that kickstarter happened that raised half a million dollars just to make shadowrun online, I think they were going about it the wrong way. That money should be raised solely to buy back the digital property. Once its all together, then the two party negotiations can start.

[adzling]

there's no way i'd trust catalyst with anything like this.

they are borderline incompetent when it comes to srun.

[Wakshaani]

Oh man, the Shadowrun MUSH. Wonder how much of what I built there is sill being used? I remember laying down the Redmond Barrens back in the day when it first started and a few other parts as well.

Good times, good times...

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Yeah I played on Seattle, but when Detroit spun up I was the media GM simply because I was the only one available who owned Shadowbeat.

I bet there's a lot of those old mushers still around.

[DarkLloyd]

I never ran in the Mush's but i ran all over Shadowland.

[Singularity]

Just a couple of questions, since I couldn't find them in the Forum Speak thread:

• What is a MUSH?
• What is a MUD?

[Redwulfe]

MUSH stands for Multi-user Shared Hallucination or Multi-user Shared Hack and MUD stands for Multi-user Dungeon.

Basically, these are old textbased play by post style games that were sort of like text-based MMO or Massive Multi-player Online games.

This is a drastic simplification but think World of Warcraft but text-based with descriptions of location that are given to you when you travelled from room to room to talk with other players.

[Singularity]

MUSH stands for Multi-user Shared Hallucination or Multi-user Shared Hack and MUD stands for Multi-user Dungeon.

Basically, these are old textbased play by post style games that were sort of like text-based MMO or Massive Multi-player Online games.

This is a drastic simplification but think World of Warcraft but text-based with descriptions of location that are given to you when you travelled from room to room to talk with other players.

Huh, sounds a bit neat although it also sounds like it could get confusing: How would you remember where you were when you went out exploring, and how would you find your way back?

[absinthe]

I was a player/admin on Seattle mush too. I might even have my +sheet laying around somewhere, perhaps on the older machine.