The Ghost of a Game

One of the great oddities of MMO’s that we are perhaps only just now experiencing is this – what happens when an MMO dies?

SOE created a Matrix Online scrapbook of sorts in memoriarium.

The Shadowbane site is gone it seems, but the Wiki lives on, preserving the lore and information of the world.  (What a grand PnP RPG setting that would make!)

But one game I’ve come across several times now, and only just realized this week that it was dead.  Kaput.  Belly Up, Servers Down.

Dark and Light.

I don’t know much about the game other than what I have been able to glean from Wikipedia and some random news archives, but basically the game suffered from poor developer communication and in house business partner fighting, and was thus dead before it was really ever unveiled.

Of course, other games have suffered like this and yet still continue to stumble onwards.

Hello? Oh God, where is everyone? Everyone's lost but me...

But what is amazing about Dark and Light’s site is that there is no announcement, news release, or indication that the game is completely and totally dead.  You could navigate the site, read all about it, even download the client, only to find that it would repeatedly fail to connect.  And then you might check the forums and poke around a bit and then notice that its actually…you know, dead.

Apparently you can still play around solo in the demo world, but the game is so buggy even that might not happen.  I’m tempted to do it anyway though.  God knows why.  I mean, I like exploring, but that would be sick and twisted right.  To download a dead game’s client just to ride around in the dead world solo.  Alone.   Nobody in their right mind would do that right?  Right?

…I need some kind of an intervention don’t I?