Roland Emmerich Seems To Abandon Stargate With New Sci-Fi Franchise Space Nation
Roland Emmerich is helming an ambitious multimedia sci-fi franchise called Space Nation which will include an MMORPG, TV series, and more.
Roland Emmerich is no stranger to kicking off multimedia sci-fi franchises. That may be an oddly specific statement, but it’s true, considering his film Stargate kicked off multiple spin-off shows, a web series, video games, and more. It looks like Emmerich is going to take another crack at making a massive multimedia sci-fi with his recently unveiled franchise Space Nation.
Deadline reported that Roland Emmerich is teaming up with several other creatives to make an online space opera game, a TV series, and a series of animated shorts under the Space Nation IP. It seems like Emmerich is putting together a solid team, as it includes Jerome Wu, who has worked on World of Warcraft, Tony Tang, who has worked on Warframe, and The Thirteenth Floor producer Marco Weber. If Emmerich is wanting to start his franchise with a video game, having World of Warcraft and Warframe creatives definitely seems like a good move.
The first step in Roland Emmerich’s Space Nation empire is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) where players can be ship captains exploring the Telikos Cluster. The game will feature three factions of alien species with their own ideologies and goals. Those who sign up for the alpha release of the game will only have to wait until August 2023 to start playing, while the commercial release is set to be sometime during Q2 2024.
This certainly seems like an ambitious plan for Roland Emmerich, and it’ll be interesting to see if Space Nation can have the same pull on fans that Stargate did. At the very least, his backers seem to believe in the franchise as he was funded with $50M from Chain Hill Capital, Foresight Ventures, Lighthouse Capital, SevenX Ventures, HashKey Capital, Arcane Group, Initiate Capital, JDAC Capital, Assembly Partners, and Cristian Manea. Emmerich and his team will be seeking even more funding in the fall.
Hopefully, Roland Emmerich and his team can make Space Nation an entertaining and exciting success story, but this certainly might feel bittersweet for Stargate fans. While Emmerich has previously indicated that he doesn’t really have much interest in continuing to work on that franchise, Stargate fans certainly feel like their favorite IP has been neglected for a while now. Maybe Space Nation will be the salve these fans need.
As mentioned, Roland Emmerich also plans to follow up the Space Nation video game with a TV series, spin-off games, and animated shorts. It seems likely that the development of these will partly hinge on the popularity and interest of the games, but it’s also possible that these are already in the works. It would certainly be bold to create a bunch of different continuations of a franchise without knowing how fans will react first, but it seems like this project was designed to be as ambitious as possible.
You can check out the alpha build of Roland Emmerich’s Space Nation game in August or wait until 2024 to check it out in a full build. You can also check out his upcoming gladiator project, Those About to Die. The drama will stream on Peacock.
