A few years ago several World of Warcraft players with way too much time on their hands decided that it would be a good idea to rig their computers to a treadmill so they could virtually “run” across Azeroth.  Unfortunately the video and the page that originally linked to it have vanished into the virtual ether, but suffice it to say that the heroes of the story soon learned that they were not, in fact, nearly as fit as their digital selves.

It seems as though these days you can’t have a conversation about Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games without someone asking which one is going to be the World of Warcraft killer.  Personally?  I happen to agree with my buddy Kevin Stallard who boldly stated that there would never be a WoW killer.  Regardless of our opinion, though, people still speculate who is going to have the power to dethrone the 800 pound gorilla that Blizzard created, and many folks are wondering if the Asian inspired Aion from NCSoft has what it takes to become King of the Hill.

So what, you may be wondering, does dominance in the MMO industry have to do with a Health and Fitness blog?

Well, it seems as though a few Aion players took the idea of attaching a treadmill to a computer to move your character while playing WoW and took it to the next level.  In Aion not only can your characters run, they can fly, and in order to simulate that movement the mad scientist geeks connected a Wii-mote to their console and flapped their arms to represent wings.

Interestingly enough, the same company that hosted the original World of Warcraft treadmill video, Mana Energy Potion, is now hosting the Aion treadmill videos.  The experiment is also eerily similar in terms of hardware, scripting, etc, only now there’s wings and Wiimotes in the mix. All traces of the earlier WoW treadmill experiment have been removed from their site and the video was taken down from YouTube.

I guess the Mana Energy Potion folks are the type that only support one game at a time and that they have thrown their hat in the ring with Aion.