When a Video-Game World Ends | Hacker News Reader

When a Video-Game World Ends

theatlantic.com

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A funny counterpoint is when an apocalypse occurs in a video game world accidentally. Take, for example, World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

Through an exploit, a viral debuff can escape and infect any player or NPC in the world. Cue entire cities dying with no way to stop it. It was interesting enough that the CDC investigated.

Blizzard ended up repeating this event intentionally as a promo for the second expansion (a zombie apocalypse) and ironically, people hated it because it made the game unplayable!

Another funny accidental apocalypse in early WoW was kiting raid bosses to cities, letting them wreak havoc until a GM despawns them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl0VWJdE01M

EVE Online, of course, had a similar incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB

On January 27, 2014 (YC 116 in-game), the one-year anniversary of the immense Battle of Asakai, player corporation "H A V O C", a member of Nulli Secunda, which in turn is a part of the N3/Pandemic Legion coalition, mistakenly failed to make a scheduled payment to in-game security force CONCORD. This resulted in the star system B-R5RB losing its sovereign status, which meant that other players could capture the system without needing to wait for the normal "reinforcement timers" (real time waiting periods of several days designed to allow defenders to rally).

I played EVE Online for a good 6 months but never really got over the learning curve hump, at least to the point where I would consider it "fun". I found myself split screening it and having an Excel spreadsheet open and suddenly I realized I was competing in an virtual economy that was all too real.

Oh man, the memories. My server was big on open world PvP, and I was in a large guild that enjoyed raiding Stormwind. We would often storm the city and hold the throne room with a few hundred players. If you got enough Alliance players to stay and fight you, eventually the entire zone would lag, and then the entire continent would crash for about 10 minutes. Any player on the Eastern Kingdoms would get booted back to the character select screen.

There is a legendary weapon (Thunderfury) that can only be gained through a long questline ending with an open-world boss fight that takes 20-40 players (depending on your skill level), just for a single person to get the weapon.

We raided Darnassus at the same time we knew our rival guild was attempting the quest and successfully prevented them from getting it by crashing all of Kalimdor* :)

> Another funny accidental apocalypse in early WoW was kiting raid bosses to cities, letting them wreak havoc until a GM despawns them

Blizzard repeated this event as a promo for the BC expansion too! "High Lord Kruul" would spawn in front of player cities with an army of burning legion mobs. He had nearly identical stats and skills as Kazzak.

* They tried again next week and got the weapon...

GM?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamemaster

Game Master

My daughter played an MMO by Disney called Pixie Hollow. In the game, players were given pets that they needed to play with, keep clean and feed to keep healthy.

About a month after the game closed, she woke up from a nightmare. She dreamed of the pets huddled in the ruins after all the fairies (players) had left them behind. It sounded heartbreaking.

A few years ago I remembered the name of the MUD I played in college. Found it was still online. Couldn't remember my old pw so I created a new character and 'finger'-ed my old character, the one who almost caused me to flunk a semester, and there she was. Still had the same .plan file. Seemed like the correct level and titles too. "Last logged in: 19 years ago". I did the same for my old friends. The most recent was 17 years ago.

I don't get nostalgic often or easily, but I felt this amazing sadness for a minute. All those people who were so close to me. All gone half a lifetime ago but they're still here in a way. Memorialized as bits on a German university server which very few still visit.

Another counterpoint to this is a world that exists despite almost no one playing it: Clanlord[1]. I started playing this game during its beta test when I was 16(I'm 32 now) where there were as many as 200 players on a single server. It predated every MMORPG you've ever heard of, unless you were into online games during their earliest days. I still log on there every now and then to "spend" my ranks (basically leveling up skills), and there are still afk clients consistently logged into the server which sit in the town center to heal folks. The coolest thing is the fact that its creator has posted patch notes[2] every 2 weeks for the last 16 years -- how incredible is that?

What's interesting about this game is how the creator of it solved a lot of very difficult technical challenges where there was no common solution at the time. There was always one computer running one persistent world, so he spent a lot of time working on scaling out the performance of that server to be able to handle a possible load of 200 concurrent connections, where the average game at the time could maybe handle 6-8.

Knowing what I know now about programming, I would love to be able to get under the hood of that game and play around with it.

[1] https://www.deltatao.com/clanlord/

[2] https://www.deltatao.com/clanlord/news/new.html

I was a GM on ClanLord for quite a while. I'm the one who designed a way for players to compose and play music together 'live', and all the 'Bard' stuff. In the days of slow modem connections, it was pretty cool.

Some guys who started more or less as a Bard in ClanLord as a teen ended up making a living out of it eventually, as a real life composer! http://www.donaldsonworkshop.com/coriakin/

Underrated Mac gaming gem from way back in the day! Thanks for the nostalgia!

Graphical MMOs that predate it are Habitat (1986), Neverwinter Nights (1991), Meridian 59 (1995), The Realm (1996), and Ultima Online (1997). In 1999 when Asheron's Call and EverQuest came out, games like this became obsolete.

But there are still a few hundred players of Sierra's The Realm, which first came out in 1996.

There are also many community emulators for Ultima Online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(1991_video...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_59

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Realm_Online

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online

Actually CL existed long before 1999 -- I know that very well. I don't have an exact date; the 'official' release date was 1998, but it was just a rubber stamp thing; it had been functioning in Beta mode for several years before that. The release date was just a question of resetting everyone's characters and starting again on a (must slower) experience path.

Not to forget Tibia, which was released in January 1997, is still developed and run by the same company and has thousands of concurrent players at any time of the day.

The problem is that these games are done forever.

I think the publisher should make a useful software to create some private servers after they shutdown their services. mostly that games could still "live" even without the publisher. I mean if they didn't some things will be gone like forever.

The problem with that is IP.

Take a game like Star Wars Galaxies, for instance. Sony didn't own the rights to Star Wars; it was licensing them. When it shut down the game, turning the code over to the public would have been a violation of their license and would have gotten them sued.

Now let's take an example of a game based on original IP. Even then, the publisher presumably wants to maintain its control over that IP. It wants to preserve the option to sell new iterations on that IP at some point in the future.

Even in the case of a publisher's going bankrupt or shutting down, it will attempt to liquidate its assets (IP being a key asset) in order to pay off its creditors. (For example: this is how the Terminator franchise keeps surviving in various iterations, despite the bankruptcy of its original IP holder. The rights were auctioned off at fire sale prices, rather than simply committed to the public domain.)

Intellectual property is the entire basis of the entertainment industry, be it movies or games. It is, accordingly, very fiercely guarded.

[Note: this is not a comment about the ethics or the morals of IP, nor a comment on what game companies should do. It is merely an observation.]

I wonder if some kind of trust arrangement in the original IP license could accommodate this.

ie: At the end of this licensure period, $publisher may make technical game material available for use. These materials do not extend a license etc etc. $publisher may not charge for, etc etc.

Most of the time, these old games will have small user bases, and if not, the licensor should be able to exploit that in some way.

It's an interesting thought. And I've actually seen games in the wild where something kinda-sorta like this seems to have happened. Not, MMOs. But in some cases old PC or Mac games, now being rereleased, decades later, as nostalgia plays. In cases where there was an IP license involved in the original game, the rereleases are sometimes (but rarely) genericized. Your hypothetical Chewbacca the Wookiee becomes Grordor the Tree Troll, and his Chewbacca sprite is replaced by a bit-riddled rendition of an orangutan with a crossbow. Or what have you.

Of course, every license is slightly to significantly different from the rest. So no telling which games involved more liberal or more restrictive terms within their original agreements.

I've been thinking about this before, but more in the sense of ever-increasing copy protection: I would propose that, in order to qualify for extended-term copyright, an unencumbered version is put in escrow, outside of the copyright owner's control. This would then ensure that when the copyright term is over, the work is still available and in a suitable format for adaptation.

Not sure how that would translate to MMO games though... should we put only the code and design in escrow, or also (parts of) the generated worlds? Player characters? Design tools?

A good case where this happened was with the Flash 2D "Crafting" MMO named "Glitch" created by the former Flickr founders. After the game terminated, they released all the art and source code to the public domain: https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

Because of it, two revival projects exist: Eleven (http://elevengiants.com/) and Children of Ur (http://childrenofur.com/).

I only played this game briefly when it was around and it didn't hold my interest for long, but it was a really unusual and quirky game. I'm sure the devs go into more detail somewhere why it failed, but it was likely because of bad timing-- it was a post-Farmville Flash game during the time when mobile gaming and HTML5 were really starting to kick off.

Glitch pivoted into Slack. :)

It's funny that the photo-sharing part of the "Game Neverending" MMO became Flickr, and the chat tool they created to communicate while working on Glitch became Slack. It's a double coincidence of side-project success.

I would like to see a binding license that commits the source to public domain (or GPL) after a set number of years or a certain event (like closing of service).

Hopefully if it got popular game companies and crowd sourced games would be "forced" to use it.

Lot's of dependencies are used that they do not own the rights to do this with. Not practical.

What about documenting the requirements to rebuild it from scratch? Not trivially done, but these are exactly the types of games that attract the people willing to put in the work.

Publishers may wind up spending money and diverting resources just to give their IP away to people who might otherwise be customers for new properties.

Typically not so much on the servers. And in nearly all cases a "no third party proprietary code" server requirement is very feasible.

Not always, Star Wars has been reverse engineered and brought back online. http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php

Useful commented server stuff would be nice, but the least they could do just drop the server blob and let the community figure it out.

Needing to reverse engineer the servers is the hard part.

I've spend far too much time on this project than I care to admit.

It was a incredible adventure, we had to reverse everything from server to client. We made our own tools, reversed each packet byte by byte, maintained a wiki. It took years. I personally learned alot and would love to do something like that again. If only I had time.

One of the best way to learn if you ask me.

I've always wondered what happens to all the art assets; you'd think there would be just tons of 3d models from defunct games that could all go to some open repository.

In the US, copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the creator, even if the copyright holder doesn't actively do anything with the IP.

Those art assets probably just languish on some backup server. If they're not just completely lost.

Likely works for hire so I guess that's 95 years. I assume for a lot of companies they go thru some liquidation and hopefully aren't just wasted.

Isn't it 95 years now?

You're thinking of works made for hire or anonymous/pseudonymous works, which is the lesser of 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation:

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf

WTF? And just when I thought it couldn't get any crazier.

More dollars that could be spent on other more profitable activities.

Toontown, one of the games mentioned in the article, also got a pretty popular reverse engineered server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toontown_Online#Closure

Better to just embrace creative destruction and let them go. One thing dies that a new thing might live.

Gotta be honest: This article got me misty-eyed multiple times.

This is what I find cool about Freelancer (and games like it). There are STILL a decent amount of Vanilla and mod servers out there, and that game came out in 2003.

This is one of the big reasons I don't play much multiplayer anymore, other than Minecraft. There's no permanency and no assuredness that what you put together with your friends will be around tomorrow. I know my minecraft server is always going to be running and my friends know it too, we've built amazing things there because of it.

And no need to be an MMO to die, solo games can end, too, with their always-online requirements. Diablo 3, Destiny, Sim City, etc. all have solo-only content and will become unplayable once their parent company pulls the plug (without removing the requirement).

Played galaxies, loved it. Great crafting system. The becoming Jedi stuff was interesting but won't work in this day of social media and more widespread internet use (barely worked back then).

The overall problem is interesting. You can just shut everything down, preferably in a cool way that feels epic for the players. This is perfectly fine if the game doesn't make money anymore as a player I don't expect games to exist forever. On the other hand you could consider this scenario from the getgo and have a clear transition path once you don't want to support the game anymore. In a perfect world you'd open source everything and/or provide a transition for community run servers. It's an interesting problem how to freeze the data and keep characters the way they were but hard reset is ok as well I'd guess. This rarely happens because well open sourcing stuff is considered a bad idea often but most importantly noone wants to plan for failure (how many startup founders have a plan to wind down the business gracefully). Realistically the technology is pretty old when you fade out a game so...why not? It'll be extra afford but could also turn out to be a great trust-boost for future games. Think ID software :)

Relevant 99pi episode http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/game-over/

Final Fantasy XIV deserves a mention here too. Though it came back some months later, the original version was a massive failure, so they ended up remaking the entire game. They planned out a whole apocalyptic event for when the original servers went down, with a meteor visible in the sky and slowly getting closer in the months leading up to the shut down. They story behind it was pretty interesting, and it made the world a lot more believable when they brought it back for the new version.

Much like the article says of Star Wars Galaxies, everyone gathered for the server shut down, and at the end a video played of the impending apocalypse.

Toontown at least has been picked up by a team of fans [1] who reverse-engineered the client and built their own server software on top of Disney's open-source release of their networked actor model system, Astron [2]. They're really doing a great job with it, adding new features and content and making significant expansions to the game lore. In some ways they're able to do more with the world than Disney ever would have.

Their marketing has also been very polished - especially for a fan revival of a game targeted at young children - and the community is surprisingly healthy as a result. In run-ups to a major releases, they've run puzzle trails/mini-ARGs that have brought hundreds of people to try and piece together the clues [3].

I hope Disney doesn't swoop in one day and shut it all down, Nintendo-style. They must know about it in some capacity, as core team members from Toontown Rewritten are now major contributors to Astron. Perhaps they think it's better for their public image to let it be.

[1] https://www.toontownrewritten.com/

[2] https://github.com/Astron/Astron

[3] http://toontownrewritten.wikia.com/wiki/Alternate_Reality_Ga...

I would love to see a Twitch stream of the end of the world (of warcraft).

You'll have to wait many years for that. The cow is noticeably thinner, but by no means dry just yet. They'll keep milking it!

I'm sure there will be one, but it'll take quite a while for WoW to die like that

The end of the Wow Beta was pretty fun; giant elementals (raid boss size) attacked the major cities, most people weren't beyond level 20 and I'd certainly seen nothing like it before. Of course we couldnt make a dent in them but it was a unique (at the time) experience, well done Blizzard.

reminded me of this episode of 99 percent invisible http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/game-over/

“This server is going down! Dooooown! It's dooooomed!”

https://web.archive.org/web/20090503173458/http://archive.ga...

The final moments of Metal Gear Online 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRuouKk3TiY

I'm upset that they didn't talk about Glitch - that was an amazing MMORPG with an even more amazing end (and hopeful rebirth)

I wonder what they will do for Elite: Dangerous

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