Block N Load

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

~ the goodbye ~

Ace of Spades already has its own grave here, and Block N Load is what Jagex built next out of the same idea. Voxel terrain you can dig through and stack up, with a first-person shooter for ten players laid over the top of it. The difference was structure. Ace of Spades was a sandbox that happened to have guns in it. Block N Load gave you a build phase first, then sent the other team at whatever you had made.

That split is why it worked. You spent the opening minutes fortifying and cutting tunnels toward the enemy base, and then the match turned into a shooter played inside architecture that you and four other people had improvised. Each character came with their own blocks and toys, so a team's fort was a record of who was on it. By the end of a round the map was a ruin neither side had designed.

Jagex released it as a paid game on 30 April 2015 and reviews came in mixed. On 1 October that year it went free-to-play, which is the move a multiplayer game makes when the population is the actual product and the price is the thing keeping it small.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the owners after Jagex ~

Jagex sold the intellectual property to Toadman Interactive in 2018, with Artplant still attached to the development side. Jagex is a RuneScape company and Block N Load was never going to be its second priority, let alone its first. Toadman then ran it for another seven years, outlasting Jagex's own tenure with the game.

This one reached me as a genre rather than as a game I played. The voxel-shooter wave broke around 2013 to 2015, when every studio with a Minecraft-shaped hole in its portfolio tried to work out whether building and shooting could occupy the same five minutes. Most concluded they could not. Block N Load's answer, that you do the building first and then live in what you built, is the cleverest version of the compromise I have read about, and it still only bought the game ten years.

~ the week it got ~

The notice went up on Steam on 25 July 2025. Shutdown was set for 1 August, seven days later. In-game purchases were switched off immediately and the studio told anyone holding unused currency or a recent purchase to go to Steam Support for a refund, which is a more honest exit than the industry average.

The announcement also said the company would begin securely deleting player data in compliance with GDPR and CPRA among other privacy law. That sentence is a modern feature of these notices. A game from 2015 that accumulated a decade of accounts now ends with a legal obligation to destroy them, so the shutdown is not only the servers going dark but the records going with them.

~ the sequel that never shipped ~

Block N Load 2 was in development and had a Steam page. On 28 July, three days into the final week, it was canceled and scheduled for removal from the store on the same day the original went off. Both the thing people were playing and the thing they were told to wait for ended on 1 August 2025.

blocknload.com no longer resolves. The lineage is now two graves deep here, because a studio kept rebuilding one good idea and the idea kept falling just short of enough.

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