The creators of Neopets, Adam Powell and Donna Williams, today announced the launch of a new game studio in West Hollywood called Meteor Games. The company will focus on "creating interactive experiences that bridge the gaps between the engaging nature and broad appeal of web-based gaming, the community-focused elements of today's exploding social networks, and the fun and depth of traditional massively multiplayer online games."

Founded in 1999, Neopets has become one of the most popular online destinations for kids and teens and currently has around 45 million users. It was sold to MTV Networks for $160 million in 2005. Powell (CEO and creative director at Meteor) and Williams (COO and President) hope to leverage their experience to create an even more accessible online game world.

"Our experience developing the world and characters of Neopets provides us with a unique advantage as we create a more robust and in-depth experience with Meteor Games," said Powell. "Our goal is to create a game world that is immersive, technologically advanced and more accessible than the current slate of online games available today. We want gamers to play on their terms – when, where and how they want."

"Massively multiplayer games, casual web-based games, and social networking are all areas of explosive growth and taken together, they are defining how the Internet Generation communicates with one another and are entertained," said Williams. "Meteor Games is creating an online world that will blend these emerging elements into a single persistent experience that gamers of all ages can enjoy."

Meteor isn't quite ready to reveal the full details of its first project, but GameDaily BIZ caught up with Powell to find out more about the direction of his new company and his unique approach to online worlds.

GameDaily BIZ: Neopets was obviously focused on kids. What is the target audience for Meteor Games?

Adam Powell: Actually, Neopets wasn't aimed at children initially. When it went live in 1999, there was a lot of content aimed at older players along with a very sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. At the time Donna and I left Neopets in 2005, around a quarter of the players on the site were over the age of 18.

Meteor Games' new project will be designed and built to attract a slightly older demographic, but it will also provide content that is both appealing and appropriate for younger boys and girls. A lot of companies are now releasing virtual worlds in some form or another that are aimed solely at young children, such as "Club Penguin." And at the other end of the spectrum, games like World of Warcraft are doing incredibly well attracting players that are in their late teens and older. We see a massive potential audience bridging the gap between these types of games – and with some significant overlap – that Meteor Games can attract with its unique gameplay and content.

Artwork from Meteor's upcoming game... apparently some sort of leafy elephant creature

BIZ: You talk about creating a world that is more accessible. What are some of the major problems with accessibility in MMOs and virtual worlds today and how will you solve these problems?

AP: Some of the latest games in the genre – most obviously, World of Warcraft – have done an unbelievable job bringing new players into the MMO market and expanding beyond the traditional hardcore base. At the same time, these games still present a pretty traditional interface and experience that can present barriers to an even broader audience. We feel that we can expand upon the success of these titles by opening the game up to multiple platforms, adding more casual Flash-based game content, and staying up to date with social networking.

We're trying to escape the traditional MMO model where a user has to download a multi-gigabyte file and then play within the world only from their home computer. That is challenging, time-consuming and restrictive in how people can play the game.

Meteor Games' MMO servers will be able to talk in real time to the PC game client, of course, but also to a web page, to a social networking application, to an iPhone or to anything else connected to the Internet. This could mean that when you gain a level or defeat a particularly nasty boss it gets posted to your Facebook profile; or by playing a puzzle game on our website you unlock a chest inside the PC-based MMO experience.

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