Caller's Bane

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

~ the goodbye ~

Mojang had one hit and a studio full of people who did not want to spend their whole careers on it. Scrolls was the answer: a digital card game with a board, closer to a tactics game than to Magic, where the cards you played became units on a hex grid and pushed toward the other player's towers. Announced in 2011, closed alpha in 2012, paid open beta on 3 June 2013, full release on 11 December 2014.

The legal fight arrived before the game did. Bethesda's parent ZeniMax filed in Sweden in 2011 claiming the name Scrolls would be confused with The Elder Scrolls. Markus Persson publicly offered to settle it with a three-on-three Quake 3 match, winner takes the name, which got enormous press and no response from anyone with signing authority. The actual settlement came in March 2012 and was less fun: Mojang could use Scrolls for that specific card game and its add-ons, had to hand the trademark itself to ZeniMax, and was barred from using the word for a sequel or anything else.

Then the game underperformed. On 29 June 2015, six months after full release, Mojang announced it would stop active development because Scrolls "has reached a point where it can no longer sustain continuous development," with servers promised through at least 1 July 2016. They ran two and a half years past that promise before announcing in February 2018 that the official servers would go off on the 13th. On 20 June 2018 Mojang released the whole thing free, renamed Caller's Bane, as a client configured to point at community-run servers.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the name fight ~

The Quake 3 offer is the part everyone remembers, and it deserves a second look, because it was not a stunt for its own sake. Persson was making a point about proportion: a studio of a few dozen people had been sued over a common English noun by a publisher that could outspend them on legal fees indefinitely. A deathmatch was the only venue where the two companies were the same size.

The settlement terms are the durable damage. Mojang kept the name on a leash and surrendered the mark, which meant that if Scrolls had ever become a franchise, it could not have been called Scrolls. By the time the game died the whole thing had gone circular anyway: Microsoft bought Mojang in 2014 and ZeniMax in 2021, so both parties to the dispute ended up in the same building.

~ the decline ~

Scrolls launched into the worst possible year. Hearthstone went into open beta in January 2014, free to start and carrying Blizzard's entire marketing apparatus behind it. Scrolls cost money up front, which in a genre where the business model is accumulation of cards over months is close to fatal for the player count you need to get matched quickly. A card game with a thin player base takes longer to find you an opponent, and a slow queue drives away the marginal players, which makes the queue slower.

The board layer was genuinely good and genuinely different. It just needed a crowd, and Mojang, a company that had never had to market anything, could not produce one.

~ what came after ~

Mojang did the decent thing at the end, which is rarer than it should be. Instead of switching off and deleting the client, they released it for free with the server code pointed at community hosts, then pushed a final update on 13 March 2019 and walked away. Community servers have come and gone since. You can still download Caller's Bane today and find a game on a good evening, which puts it in a small category with the handful of dead online games whose publishers handed over the keys rather than the eviction notice.

I never played it. In 2013 I was an engineer with a job and not much patience for building a card collection from zero, and the free option next door was already eating everyone's evenings. What kept Scrolls in my head was the lawsuit, because Notch's Quake 3 challenge went around the Turkish forums the same week it went around everywhere else, and that was the only time most of us heard the game's name at all.

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