City of Heroes anniversary letter features fun facts, videos
City of Heroes devs are ramping up the PR push to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the game this week. The latest missive comes courtesy of executive producer Brian Clayton, who drops a few fun facts as well as a brief address to the game's faithful.
Some of the more interesting numbers include 43 million characters created, 500,000 accounts at level 50, 300,000 super groups, and "over 15,000 costume pieces which can be used to create over 10 trecedillion (10^42) costumes." Head past the break for the full text of Clayton's letter as well as a couple of before-and-after videos.
[Source: Paragon Studios press release]
Dear City of Heroes Players, past and present,
Amazing! This Saturday marks the eight year anniversary of the game that has been a major part of so many of our lives. Many of us at Paragon have worked on CoH for its entire commercial life. In fact, Producer Melissa "War Witch" Bianco just celebrated ten years (she's got me by a year)!
Anyways, let's take a moment to turn back time and reflect just for fun. Back in 2002 NCsoft and Cryptic Studios began our partnership which eventually led to the commercial launch of City of Heroes on April 28th, 2004. I led a team from NCsoft and we all worked within the Cryptic Studios offices. Our successful launch was amazing and invigorating, and it was just the beginning! City of Heroes had been officially born and from there we continued to add great content and run the service.
Three and a half years later in late 2007, after 10 fantastic Issues (content updates) and of course the City of Villains expansion, we (NCsoft) came to an agreement with Cryptic that we would purchase and transfer City of Heroes under the NCsoft umbrella. We formed Paragon Studios and set up shop in Mountain View, CA. Incredibly it has already been four and a half years since that time and we are now coming upon Issue 23!
As Paragon Studios we are proud to have brought so many incredible new features and improvements to the game that we love. We've introduced user generated content with Mission Architect, allowed heroes and villains to "cross the line" between good and evil with the City of HeroesGoing Rogue expansion, dramatically overhauled the graphics with Ultra-Mode, and of course last September we successfully introduced City of Heroes Freedom and the ability for players to play for free!
Just for fun, take a look at one of the original City of Heroes videos released before it launched.
Now compare it at our most recent trailer promoting Issue 22, which went live last month. Wow, have we come a long way!
Here are some fun City of Heroes facts after eight years.
Over 43 million characters created
Over 500,000 accounts have reached max level (50)
Almost 300,000 Super Groups created
12 trillion Influence held by Scrappers alone
Over 15,000 costume pieces, which can be used to create over 10 Trecedillion (10^42) costumes in the game today
Almost 4,000 powers in the game today
Over 3 million individual Super Packs cards redeemed since this February
City of Heroes is better than ever and we want to thank you, our players, for treating it with the same passion that we do. We encourage you to keep bringing your friends to the game to share the experience and join our community, and we look forward to many amazing years to come. Thanks for making City of Heroes the best super heroic MMO of all time!
Sincerely,
Brian "Crosscheck" Clayton
General Manager, Paragon Studios
