Battlestar Galactica Online

~ the goodbye ~

The first time I heard of Battlestar Galactica Online was while looking for graves to write, which is late by any measure for a game that ran eight years and took two million accounts in its first three months. I knew the show's name the way everyone did. The game attached to it never once crossed my screen.

It opened in beta on 8 February 2011. Artplant built it in Oslo and Bigpoint published it from Hamburg, under a license from the series Ronald D. Moore had finished two years earlier. You picked Colonial or Cylon when you made the account and were locked to that side afterward. The whole thing ran in a browser tab.

That last part was the trick. In 2011 a 3D space combat game with capital ships and sector control was something you installed and then patched for a week. This one you clicked. Two million registered users in under three months is what happens when the distance between hearing about a game and flying in it collapses to one page load.

By 2011 I was twenty-seven and working as an engineer, and browser MMOs were a category I had aged past rather than one I had turned down. The people this was for were younger than me and were reaching it from a link somebody had posted.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The map was sectors and the fight was over who held them. Ships came in four broad roles, from interceptors up to command hulls, with carriers and battlestars sitting above those as the things you needed a group to threaten. Outposts and platforms gave you stationary targets, which is what a persistent map needs if the fighting between raids is going to mean anything.

Money worked the way Bigpoint money always worked. Grind points and merits for a ship, or buy the ship. Underneath it the server was written in Erlang, doing something genuinely difficult for the time: holding a shared persistent space for a client most of its players thought of as a small free game.

~ the plugin problem ~

The client was Unity, running inside the Unity Web Player, which was a browser plugin. That single fact dates the entire product. In 2011 a plugin was how 3D got into a browser and every game of this kind used one. Then Chrome began stripping out support for the plugin architecture they all depended on in 2015. Firefox followed, and Unity retired the Web Player rather than fight the browsers over it.

Every browser game built that way had the same two options afterward. Ship a downloadable client and stop being a browser game, or rebuild on whatever the web could do natively. Neither is cheap, and neither is easy to justify for a licensed title already in its sixth year.

~ what really happened ~

Bigpoint announced the closure in early January 2019 and gave players until the end of the month. The wording was blunter than these notices usually are: the company said it had wanted to take the time to consider all possible options, and that after all efforts it had become clear it would no longer be able to run the game. Rumors had been going around the community for months before the announcement made it official.

The servers went off in the early hours of 1 February 2019, a week short of eight years after the beta opened. There is no offline version and nothing to reinstall. The show is still there and still gets rewatched. The game that let two million people fly in it is not.

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