System Mastery 272 – City of Heroes Playtest
Gather up, all you various tankers, scrapper, controllers, uhhh… that healer one… I’m just kidding I loved this game. It’s City of Heroes, sort of! Insofar as it’s a Unisystem take on the popular superhero MMO. Some of one. This is just an old playtest doc. We talk about why and what and all the rest today!
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System Mastery 
Some additional context for (probably) why the TTRPG stalled out: Eden Studios was almost certainly tapped in the first place because the original lead dev on City of Heroes was Jack Emmert, one of the folks who worked on All Flesh Must Be Eaten. (The Vahzilok are a reference to Eden Studios head George Vasilakos!)
But around the time all that other stuff happened, NCSoft had bought out the game and the core team was moved into their own studio while Jack Emmert and Cryptic Studios went off to do what would become Champions Online.
So basically Eden Studios’ main contact over on the MMO side…wasn’t working on the MMO anymore. Funnily enough I have a buddy who lives near George’s hobby shop and he got the same answer you cited about contact drying up when he asked him about it.
I also have my own sordid history with this playtest. Beyond playing a (possibly even further simplified) run of it at Origins in like…2005? I eventually dug up the very same PDF and despite being green when it came to RPGs I had a similar reaction to its incredibly incomplete state. Which led to me and some other folks making our own City of Heroes tabletop game. It’s probably still out there somewhere if you go digging for it, I’m sure it’s terrible, but who knows.
The comment above meshes with what the Eden Studio folks have said to me about the subject. George Vasilakos still owns my FLGS (Zombie Planet, that is, not the much older and long-defunct Imagination Games & Comics), although he suffered a stroke awhile back and (while he’s recovered well) was letting his staff take up more of the workload now, so I haven’t seen him in well over a year now.