For those who follow this sad adventure, Paragon Studios was dissolved and shut down its servers this year for City of Heroes, the world’s first super hero massively multiplayer online game (MMORPG). The parent company NCsoft made the decision to close Paragon Studios in a realignment of company focus and publishing support.

In light of NCsoft shutting down the game, fans raised concerns about the future of and also raised money to buy the team dinner. Now, a community-based game studio called Missing Worlds Media intends to launch a campaign on Kickstarter for a new MMO called the Phoenix Project, inheriting the tradition and style of City of Heroes.

Missing Worlds Media, whose members are a group of 136 programmers, designers and City of Heroes fans is planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for The Phoenix Project starting September 8^th this year to revive the classic game.

Head of The Phoenix Project, Nate Downes, told the gaming blog Polygon that 20 percent of the game’s code is already done and about one quarter to one third completed now.

“This project has grown out of the community that was left behind when City of Heroes closed, so it’s really just a lot of passionate people getting together to rebuild that home for themselves,” he said to Polygon. “It’s an all-volunteer project of 136 people right now.”

The game is being developed mainly by students, project managers, designers and volunteers with day jobs who are passionate people to rebuild the game glory. Missing Worlds studio director Cameron Johnson said the Phoenix Project needs funding and a Kickstarter campaign will give them the right platform as it is the most popular and trusted crowdfunding platform.

Johnson said The Phoenix Project hopes to recreate the spirit, feel and concepts of City of Heroes players with more attentions put into the game’s character creator.

“The most popular thing from City of Heroes was the flexible avatar creator,” Johnson said. “The way characters looked rarely if ever had any direct impact on the game, but players wanted to make their characters as super hero-y or villainous as they wanted. We want to produce our own avatar builder so people can start playing like that again.”

“[The avatar creator] has more of our attention on it, more than any other aspects [of the game] because it’s something we can put out there relatively soon,” he added. “The avatar builder goes towards that high level of customization you want: you build your character and get to play the game you want to play.”

The game engine is based on the technology of Unreal Engine, which is licensed to Epic studio with the condition that they could get their money later–after the successful completion of the campaign. The studio plans to make the Phoenix Project as much as possible similar to City of Heroes. Players will be able to perform interesting tasks such as making the character look the way they want or behave the way they want. The project team is aiming for 20 different options for each avatar’s 18 different areas as launch, with several different color options available. If the funding should succeed, The Phoenix Project would be released by end of 2015.