There is always joy in exploring a new virtual world, to see what people imagined and made by their own hands, to notice the little details in each world, to walk around and just look around.
In the past few weeks i tried to make a list of games i want to explore and show in this weblog, i watched a list of video reviews for online games, skipping any video for games i’m not interested in like FPS or a card games, and from the list i found a lot of dead games.
If an online game is dead then there is no way to play it, and by dead i mean it’s not online, you can’t download a client for it and there is no emulator for it, there is no way to access the game.
Most if not all online games leave something behind, if the game is loved by a community then the community will keep its memory alive, you see them in the comments and the forums, some of them collect screenshots for the game, some publish its soundtracks in youtube, some write about them, this is what remain of dead games.
Sometimes a community gets lucky by finding the source for the game which means people can bring the game back to life, even if this is illegal, i think it’s better to see the game again than to keep it dead.
Is it weird that i feel sad whenever i learn of an MMO then i find it dead? i never played it and yet i feel sad for it and its community, i don’t think every dead online game deserve to come back but who decide this?
In many videos i see people talk about their memories and their childhood and they wish to bring the game back while other are happy it’s dead and they think it should never come back.
I just wish the publishers have a plan for their online games, because soon or later the game will die, it may take few years or decades, but there is always a deadline, and there should be plan for that, when the game die; what do we do with it?
They can give it to the community and let the community manage it, they can turn it into a single-player game and sell it, they can make it open source and anyone is welcome to use it.
Any of these options is better than keeping the game dead and inaccessible.