Newswise — In a lush island city in southern Brazil, a small group of programmers are debugging the universe--the virtual universe of Taikodom, a science-fiction online game that their company, Hoplon Infotainment, plans to launch in September.

Hoplon says that Taikodom will allow tens of thousands of people to play together in a sprawling virtual galaxy. The game is Brazil's first incursion into the booming market of massively multiplayer online games, or MMOGs. It's a genre made famous by powerful franchises like Sony Online Entertainment's Everquest and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft.

But the Brazilians are not intimidated. After recruiting 72 employees and raising over US $10 million in venture capital funding, they're hoping to capture a fraction of the $3 billion MMOG market. To get there, the start-up is relying on Brazilians' well-known creativity and their capability for improvisation. But it's also betting on a rather unusual game server.

Clusters of PCs are the workhorses behind most MMOGs. Hoplon, however, plans to run Taikodom on an IBM System z machine; for the uninitiated, that's a mainframe. The Brazilians have partnered with Big Blue to develop a server optimized for large-scale multiplayer games by fitting a System z with Cell processors, the nine-core parallel-processing chips that power Sony's PlayStation 3. IBM calls this bit-crunching beast the gameframe.

IEEE Spectrum visited Hoplon late last year to find out how Taikodom is coming along and how the company is preparing its gameframe to handle the massive number of players it hopes to attract. Will Brazil's massive attack succeed?