Some projects take strange paths. Who would have thought, for example, that “The Expanse” was originally intended as an MMO?
The Expanse is considered one of the most successful series in Netflix’s pay-TV offerings. But what few people know about the dark space story is that “The Expanse” was actually supposed to be an MMORPG and not a series at all!
A snubbed MMO pitch: The source material for The Expanse has had quite a bizarre journey. Ty Franck, the original creator of the original story, was supposed to develop a pitch for a friend, with which a Chinese company could have developed an MMO. This was almost 15 years ago, shortly before the release of EVE Online.
The Chinese developer only seemed to realize later that an MMO would surely cost 100 million dollars and quickly withdrew from the plans.
The Expanse as a D20 adventure: Since Franck had roughly developed the source material and continued to hold the rights to it, he moved forward. He created a campaign for the D20 tabletop system from The Expanse. Years went by before the campaign later became the book series, which then served as the basis for the series.
P&P rule system secured: In the meantime, “The Expanse” is developing back again and is now trying to establish its own rule system for tabletop role-playing. For this, there is a Kickstarter campaign that had a target of 30,000 USD and reached this target in just one hour. In the meantime, this target has been exceeded by more than 800%, as 281,000 USD have already been raised.
Whether “The Expanse” will eventually also see the digital light of day as an MMO remains to be seen. If it does, the franchise would definitely return to its roots – even if those roots were never realized.
