Gamecloud - First, how did the idea for the Multiverse Network come about?

Bill Turpin - The whole Multiverse team loves playing MMOGs, and we have always been interested in the technical issues for these games. After a bit of investigation, we concluded that there was a huge pent-up demand on the part of indie game developers to enter this market. But they couldn't because it cost $20 million and three years to do so. We are a bunch of early Netscape employees, so we've been building platforms for years. We figured we could build a platform to solve this problem.

Gamecloud - How did you come up with the name of the company?

Bill Turpin - Well, it's a time-honored science fiction/quantum theory term that embodies the notion of multiple universes. It's also a play on the fact that many other companies have burned through staggering amounts of cash trying to build the one, definitive Metaverse. (The Metaverse is the 3D virtual space in Neal
Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash.) We saw this as ludicrous - the idea that one company can definitively state, "Here it is. We have built it. You will all now use it."

What we've learned from working at companies like Netscape, Borland, and SGI is that you can't force an idea like that. You should merely create the platform and tools, and step aside to see what people create organically. So instead of one definitive Metaverse, there would be multiple Metaverses - a Multiverse.