Ex-Dev From Project Copernicus Has Hard Drive Containing Game But No Password, Founds Her Own MMO Company Instead

Look, I'm a sucker for anything related to Project Copernicus and 38 Studios. The dumpster fire of a situation that saw baseball player Curt Schilling burn millions of dollars of taxpayer money in Rhode Island trying to create an MMORPG in the world of Kingdoms of Amalur is fascinating to me.

My gaming friend Tozzeb knows this and couldn't help but link me a story posted on VentureBeat today that intersects with Project Copernicus a bit.

I'm going to skip a large portion of VentureBeat's article here simply because most of it is about Irene Pereira founding a company called Unleashed and they are currently at work creating a tool called "Realm" that "leverages both gen AI and deep human expertise in growing gamer communities, making development rapid, cost-effective, and highly monetizable – scalable for both niche games with a small but passionate fanbase, to mass market MMOs with many millions of players."

Literally, that sounds awful and like something that would help create a lot of very similar games quickly to generate as much income as possible before they become vacant parking lots. I'll admit I have not seen their tools in action so I certainly reserve the right to change my opinion, but seeing their proof of concept game "Haven" doesn't inspire confidence in me. Haven is supposed to appeal to those of us with kids that remember playing World of Warcraft or EverQuest back in the day that would like our kids to experience that type of MMO.

Haven is F2P but it has monetization ranging from "$10/month for individual players, less for duos and groups, all the way to a “Village Plan” at $150/month for 150 players." These monetization tools are available right out of the box for games created on the Realm platform, so you can see who this is marketed towards.

I've put a video below on Haven for you. Watching it, I wouldn't play it and neither would my kids. To be fair, it's early development so I'll check back on that opinion later in development. Pereria also came under fire earlier this year for comments on social media bragging about Haven not including any white males as playable characters in their alpha. While some of those comments have since been deleted, many replies to critics are still available.

There's investment and industry veterans tied to Unleashed and their Realm project so we'll see, but I'm not optimistic it's something that'll be good for gamers when it's literally designed to be sold to companies that want to make an MMO for less cash, staff, and time. We shall see.

The cool part of this story for me is the link to Project Copernicus. You see, Pereria worked back at 38 Studios back then and watched the entire debacle from the inside. “I saw $133 million set on fire by a baseball player,” Pereira said. She says she may write a book about it some day, and I'd certainly pick up a copy of that on day one.

Pereria also claims to have a hard drive that contains the contents of the game. However, Pereria doesn't have the password. She had a lead on someone who might have it but, as it turns out, that person has since passed away. 

THQ Nordic acquired the rights to Project Copernicus back in 2018 and Pereria says she has been in contact with them regarding the IP, but no details on those discussions were given. Pereria does have other leads on potentially getting the hard drive's password according to VentureBeat.

That's a hard drive I'd love to see someday.