This might be out of line, if so, please just delete it...
Quite a while back when NCSoft was making a push to popularize City of Heroes in Korea, a stand alone character creator was released to the public (free of charge; no log-in required as I remember). It got tinkered with quite a bit upon release and I remember the masses found a way to translate the software from Korean to English.
For the most part, the software was forgotten. If you wanted to play with the character creator, you could always just log-in and have all the updated goodies to play with. I vaguely recall around 2007 an effort was being made to update the files in the character creator to reflect the many, many updates that had come out to that point. I have no idea of the success of this project.
So here we are in 2012 and we're losing a piece of gaming history. I am a stern believer of remembering where we came from in regards to video game lore. As such, I'm an avid supporter of projects like MAME and the players/speed runners that keep at least some spotlight on classic games. If I was forced to pick one aspect of City of Heroes that was revolutionary, it would be the community; if I had to pick another, more preservable aspect, it would be the character creator. It's something that will take years, maybe even decades to duplicate in the gaming world as so few games have the need for such a high level of custom character design. Ten years from now when someone points out how many options a game has for the way you look, we need to be able to point them to the character creator from City of Heroes and say, "It's still not as good as this".
I'm afraid I can't offer much more than an idea... Maybe it's possible to add new options to the Korean stand-alone creator, maybe it would be easier just to try to lift the current creator -- I simply don't know. What I do know, though, is the character creator is the stuff of legend and could be a suitable legacy for our beloved game if all else fails.
