The last week has been surreal... And since we haven’t written a blog post in a while, I thought I'd post this here to share.
As many of you know already, in the past 4 years (Oct 2017), we’ve worked on Omicron Protocol, which is set in the year 2050, where a pandemic hit the city of San Lazaro, and the bio-tech virus causes the city to be locked down, infected victims turn into "CyMS”, and people in the city form factions trying to survive and/or get out however they can.
Originally, the game name was chosen from a less used Greek alphabet that still had the feeling of “Omega” when used (intriguing, ponderous, mysterious). But since Omega is used a lot, Omicron was the next best thing in our opinion. Because it’s less used, it was also easier for us to get found with Google search and easier for people to remember the name if they’ve seen it before.
Most of you know the rest of the development story: 2 Kickstarters in 2019, success, moving on to start manufacturing in 2020.
Well, early 2020, COVID-19 hit. A lot of you reached out and jokingly asked, "did you guys know about this pandemic???" (answer: no, we didn't :P ). It was already pretty surreal then, but we chugged along while in lock down, and continued to get all the content finished and sent to the manufacturer.
2021, after a lot of hiccups and delays caused by the pandemic, we finally get close to the end. Last week, just as we finished manufacturing and got our first advanced physical copies of the final product (seen in the photo below), WHO declares the "Omicron" variant of COVID-19, and we are bombarded with news articles everywhere covering "Omicron this" and "Omicron that". More joking questions come in from our friends and supporters. And we're left wondering, "of all the Greek letters of variants that are 'of high concern', what are the chances that Omicron is one of them?"
Of course, some people say "no publicity is bad publicity", but we're still hoping that the variant is not as bad as Delta or Alpha, and that talking about our game will not cause anyone pain due to any potential havoc the variant causes.
So far, it looks like most people are supportive and understanding that this is a coincidence and that there was no way we could have predicted everything that happened in 2020 and 2021 with COVID. Of course, if CyMS start appearing on the streets… we’d recommend you RUN! =P
Anyway, just wanted to share these thoughts and how our game name came to be. We'll continue to chug along getting the game out to our KS backers ASAP in 2022, and go on the convention circuit as we originally planned, hoping that things will turn out well for people (both for the variant and our game).
Thanks for reading, and we’re happy to answer any questions in the comments if you have any.
Bernie & Brendan
