CCP Games

Sci-fi MMO EVE Online could be leaving the confines of your computer, with plans for a TV series moving ahead.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of developer CCP Games, tells WIRED that the studio is "actively working" on a serial adaptation of the popular game, in association with Ridley Scott. "We're actually exploring that with Ridley Scott's production company and Baltasar Kormákur, an Icelandic director," Pétursson says, speaking at EVE Fanfest 2016. "We're actively working on that. I think we have some traction on it."


Plans for an EVE Online TV series first surfaced back in 2013, but development has been on the backburner as CCP focused instead on expanding the core game and experimenting with virtual reality (ultimately resulting in EVE Valkyrie). Now, plans seem to be moving forwards again. "It's a very big idea obviously – doing a television series is something that takes years to get going," Pétursson says. "I think House of Cards took around seven years to get going."

Once it does get going, there's plenty of material to serve as inspiration for season arcs. EVE Online is about to turn 13, and in addition to its own central lore – 21,000 years future, humanity has long abandoned Earth and now colonises distant worlds, but our penchant for political strife and military squabbles follow us to the stars – the game has played host to years of stories and events instigated by player actions. Some of the most notable have left their mark of the universe's fiction and impact events moving forward. "I think the world and events of EVE Online could, in many ways, be constructed into a TV series just like Andrew Groen has taken the history and structured Empires of EVE," Pétursson says. Groen's book is a history of the greatest conflicts in the game, presented as an in-universe chronicle of past events.

Don't expect to see EVE on the big screen though. "I think there's a huge opportunity to bring EVE Online's stories that have already happened into something like a television series," Pétursson says. "[Not] a movie – EVE is the size of Game of Thrones, and you couldn't make a movie about Game of Thrones, it's just way too big. EVE Online is at that scale, so I think a TV series is something that makes sense."