Anyland

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

~ the last words ~

Anyland arrived on Steam on 6 October 2016 at $11.99, Vive only, and closed on 29 February 2024. It shipped with no content in it. You reached out with the hand controllers, pulled a shape out of the air, stuck it to another shape, and if you wanted the result to do something you typed plain-language commands onto it. Every object anyone ever saw inside Anyland had been assembled that way by a person wearing a headset.

Philipp Lenssen and Scott Lowe built it and kept it running on Patreon money. The press kit's own accounting is over 10,000 areas holding more than 250,000 objects. Steam logged 390 reviews across the whole run, 367 of them positive, which is simultaneously a 94 percent rating and a very small room.

The warning came on 2 October 2023, when Lenssen posted to the Steam forum that the server provider had raised prices considerably that year and the project was in the red every month. The closure notice followed on 29 November: the server and development budget had run out, so Anyland and its sibling Manyland would both shut down. February 29th was named as the date. 2024 happened to have one.

I never owned a headset. The Vive was 799 dollars at launch and that was before the machine it needed, and nothing about my setup in Ankara argued for either number. So Anyland reaches me entirely through its archive, which for a world where every single object was made with hand controllers is a real limit on what I can tell you about it.

~ the record ~

~ built by hand, all of it ~

It was a Unity project and it shipped in stages. Vive at launch, then Rift and Windows Mixed Reality. A desktop mode for people with no headset at all arrived on 27 November 2017, and somewhere in 2017 the price went to zero and stayed there. Scripting was typed text attached to objects rather than a node graph, which is how a two-person team gets a scripting system shipped at all.

The other thing that made it strange was the economy, or the lack of one. There was no marketplace and no asset store. Kent Bye interviewed Lenssen for Voices of VR in August 2017 specifically about gift-economy dynamics inside Anyland, because people made things and handed them over and that was the whole mechanism.

~ the arithmetic of two people ~

Two names on the credits, one of them in Germany and one of them in the UK, against a persistent multiplayer world with servers to pay for. The budget line in the closing notice is worth reading literally: a lack of budget also meant a lack of budget for updates, which is the developer saying the thing had been coasting for a while before it stopped.

The VR press never covered the ending. Road to VR and UploadVR had both written it up in 2016 and 2017, and neither ran a word about the shutdown. The only public announcement is a pinned forum post on a store page that is no longer reachable.

~ where it went ~

The Steam listing is delisted. The API returns failure for app 505700 and the store page reports the item as unavailable, though the community hub is still standing and the reviews still serve. Lenssen put the source on GitHub. A community effort at Renyland.fr revisits old areas and builds new items out of them, and one member of the community reported archiving 98 percent of Anyland's public areas before the servers went off.

anyland.com never went dark either. It still loads the same page, with the closing message near the top and the pull quotes still underneath it, including one from the creator of Adventure Time reading "I love it!" in the present tense.

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