Ace of Spades

» see aceofspades.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ace of Spades went online on 4 April 2011 as a free download from one person. Ben Aksoy built it on the voxlap engine with terrain you could dig through, then put rifles in it. The shorthand everybody reached for was Minecraft with guns, which undersold the thing that actually made it work: you could remove the ground somebody was standing on.

It spread the way free PC games spread in 2011, on word of mouth and a download link that asked you for nothing. By November 2012 the beta had been installed two and a half million times and was holding around 550,000 monthly players, with no publisher and no marketing behind it.

Jagex bought it that year. The studio behind RuneScape rebuilt the game in its own engine and shipped version 1.0 on Steam on 12 December 2012 at $9.99, added an OS X build the following May, and renamed the whole thing Ace of Spades: Battle Builder in 2013. It reviewed badly, 49 on Metacritic, and the reviews kept making the same comparison. The paid game was worse than the free game it had replaced.

That comparison never stopped being available, because the free version was still on people's hard drives. Everything that happened to Ace of Spades over the next six years happened in the gap between an official product losing players and an unofficial one keeping them.

~ the case file ~

~ what jagex bought ~

Jagex in 2012 was a company with one enormous browser game and a search for a second one. Ace of Spades arrived as a finished idea with a live audience, which is the cheapest thing a publisher can buy, and the rebuild turned it into a boxed product with unlocks and a price. Jagex followed it with Block N Load in November 2014, a free-to-play successor with the same build-and-shoot premise and a cleaner art style, which found its own small audience and outlasted the game it came from.

~ the classic build ~

The free versions, 0.75 and the 0.76 beta that Jagex never signed off on, kept running on player-hosted servers after the official downloads went away. Build and Shoot collected the installers and the server list. yvt wrote OpenSpades, an open source client for the 0.75 protocol that looked better than either official release, and other clients came after it. None of this needed permission, because the classic client talked to servers that ordinary people ran on ordinary boxes.

The name on the original build stopped me for a moment when I first read it. Aksoy is common enough at home that I registered it as a Turkish surname before I registered anything else about the game, and I have no idea whether that is what it is. That is the entire extent of my connection to this one. In 2011 I was twenty-seven and working in Ankara, and a free multiplayer shooter passed me by on the simple grounds that I no longer had those evenings.

~ the last day of servers ~

On 3 April 2018 Jagex removed Ace of Spades from sale and said the servers would run until 3 July, citing underlying technical problems it could not resolve. Players asked for the code instead of a switch-off, and Jagex agreed to look. The review took ten months. On 1 March 2019 the studio posted that the licensing implications made an open source release impossible, and set the closing for Wednesday 6 March at noon GMT.

The servers went off on schedule. Build and Shoot answered the same evening, as it had every evening since 2012, running the version Jagex had bought and stopped selling.

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