Q: How did the idea for City of Heroes come about?

ML - We first started kicking around the idea of making an online game in 1999. The decision was what kind of online game to make? Fantasy had been done, and we while there is plenty of room for new ideas within that genre, we decided it wasn’t the most exciting. We weren’t sure about the mass appeal of sci-fi, but when the superhero idea came up, we knew we had it. It’s the most flexible genre there is: magic, technology, aliens, mutants, monsters, time travel, other dimensions... you name it, it fits into the comic book genre. And everyone knows what a superhero is, whereas (until recently) not everyone knew what an elf and an orc were. We briefly considered the so-called superhero curse of video games, but decided it was rubbish. We were so excited it wasn’t really a decision. We had to do it!