Celebs Playing MMO Games
Celebs in MMOs
Have you ever wondered who you might be clashing swords with or who was piloting that ship you just blew into oblivion? With MMO games you have no idea about the person behind the avatar. Sure you might know a few mates from the real world who play but for the most part the people you are brushing past every day are a complete mystery. Well with so many million people online there is a good chance that some of them are famous celebrities.
Celebrities Playing World of Warcraft
The ridiculous popularity of WoW continues unabated and several celebrities appeared in their advertising campaign including Mr. T, William Shatner, Verne Troyer and Ozzy Osbourne. They all claim that they play for real but I have trouble imagining that Ozzy is really capable. On the other hand I can imagine William Shatner as a Tauren Shaman.
Many celebrities have talked about playing WoW including Leonard Nimoy, Robin Williams, Mila Kunis, Brandon Routh, Steven Spielberg, Dave Chappelle, Felicia Day, Vin Diesel and Curt Schilling. There are also reports that Macaulay Culkin, Cameron Diaz, Kanye West, Hulk Hogan, Ben Affleck and Jessica Simpson play World of Warcraft. Probably a lot of celebrities do, let’s face it they don’t have to work the same hours that most of us do so they’ve certainly got the time. There is no way to confirm the rumours and few of them have let their characters names be known. It is no surprise really because you can imagine what would happen. A crowd of fans mobbing and a bigger crowd of haters out to grief them. I’d love to chop up Spielberg for what he did to Indiana Jones.
Rock Musicians
WoW also seems to be popular with rockers as the lead singer of Korn, Jonathan Davis plays as an Undead, a member of The Killers plays, Marty Friedman from Megadeth and George Fisher from Cannibal Corpse has ranted about playing WoW in an interview. Eric Bloom from The Blue Oyster Cult is a big MMORPG junkie and likes to play WAR, you can find an interview with him on the subject here.
Celebrity MMO Development
A couple of celebrities have taken their MMO love further and started development of their own games. Curt Schilling, the baseball legend, founded 38 Studios and they are making an MMORPG with the working title Copernicus. He started out as a designer on the game but had a rude awakening with his “sky is the limit” approach and has now removed himself to a management position.
Vin Diesel and his company Tigon Studios are apparently working on a game about Hannibal called Barca B.C. Vin called it his “dream game” and also referred to it as an MMO but on the website they are calling it an action RTS. We’ll just have to wait and see.
So What?
Ultimately I’m not a huge fan of the celebrity obsession culture. They are just people after all. Successful and rich out of all proportion to their talents but people just the same. They do all the same things as the rest of us so it should come as no surprise they play MMOs. Sometimes the idea of certain celebrities playing MMOs is still oddly shocking though. My favourite one is probably Samuel L. Jackson who said in an interview that he likes to play Eve Online in his spare time.
