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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 799 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Star Conflict 📖 2012 - 2026 fourteen years, which is the number gaijin kept returning to in its goodbye letter. star conflict opened in beta in july 2012 and switched its servers off on 9 october 2026 at 10:00 gmt, one day earlier than the april announcement had promised. the stated reasons were infrastructure costs and a play |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Mario Kart Tour 📖 2019 - 2026 276 million downloads over seven years, and an estimated 268.5 million dollars, which works out to under a dollar a head. that was mario kart tour, nintendo's gacha version of the only racing game it has ever needed. new content stopped in october 2023 and the servers stopped at 11pm pacific on 29 s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Let It Die 📖 2016 - 2026 the apocalypse in this game is dated 2026, and 2026 is when the servers went off. let it die dropped you at the bottom of a tower on a drowned piece of tokyo with no clothes on, free to play, supervised by a grim reaper on a skateboard, and when you died your corpse was shipped into somebody else's |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Warface: Clutch 📖 2013 - 2026 on 25 august 2026 my.games switched off the last console servers and the international warface was gone, thirteen years after its worldwide release and fourteen after the russian beta. crytek's kyiv studio had built it as a free shooter for markets that were never going to pay sixty dollars for one, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Crazy Arcade 📖 2001 - 2026 crazy arcade opened in korea on 16 october 2001 with one mode: eight people in a small grid dropping water balloons on each other until one was left. it was in every pc bang in the country within a year, and by late 2002 nexon was counting thirty-five million registered players. hudson soft sued ove |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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The Elder Scrolls: Blades 📖 2020 - 2026 bethesda's mobile elder scrolls spinoff launched in early access during 2018 and went 1.0 on may 12 2020. it ran first-person dungeons stitched together with a town-building meta-game and the timer-and-gem economy mobile demands. critics never warmed to it. it shut down on june 30 2026 after six yea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Rec Room 📖 2016 - 2026 rec room was the seattle vr-social platform that ran from 2016 to 2026. it raised about $289 million and hit a $3.5 billion peak valuation in december 2021. with 150 million lifetime players it never figured out how to make the unit economics work. the founders announced closure on march 30 2026 and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Turtle WoW 📖 2018 - 2026 turtle wow started in 2018 with about a hundred people on one realm and grew into the largest classic+ server on the internet, running the 2006 version of world of warcraft with fan-built zones and races blizzard never made. in august 2025 it passed 44,000 concurrent players. that same month blizzar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Vega Conflict 📖 2013 - 2026 it started in a browser tab in august 2013, a free-to-play space war on facebook where you built fleets, raided other players' outposts and waited out upgrade timers. vega conflict lasted almost thirteen years, which is longer than the flash runtime it launched on, and kixeye switched it off on 15 m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt 📖 2021 - 2026 about six hundred people a day were still turning up when sharkmob called it. the studio in malmo had taken world of darkness, a tabletop setting built around vampires hiding from humans, and turned it into a battle royale where sixteen of them fight over the rooftops of prague. it peaked at 29,008 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile 📖 2024 - 2026 fifty million people pre-registered before launch and the game earned 2.2 million dollars across its entire life. call of duty: warzone mobile shipped on 21 march 2024 after years of work spread across four activision studios, ran hot enough that players complained about the handset itself, and was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Pocket Mortys 📖 2016 - 2026 pocket mortys was a pokemon parody with enough licensing muscle to say so out loud. you played rick c-123. you caught wild mortys with manipulation chips and fused duplicates of a type into stronger ones, grinding toward the council of ricks. it ran a full decade on content drops and made enough mon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2025-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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King of Meat 📖 2025 - 2026 amazon games was aiming at a hundred thousand people playing king of meat at the same time. the steam peak was three hundred and twenty. glowmade, a guildford studio run by people who used to make fable, had built a co-op dungeon crawler where the players built the dungeons, and the reviews came bac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Real Racing 3 📖 2013 - 2026 real racing 3 was ea and firemonkeys' mobile racing flagship. it shipped february 2013 with licensed cars from porsche to bugatti and ran for thirteen years on a freemium grind that critics hated and players kept paying for. ea delisted the app in december 2025 and pulled the servers on 19 march 202 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Supervive 📖 2024 - 2026 47,913 people were playing supervive on steam on 24 november 2024, four days after the open beta opened. a hundred and twenty six million dollars of venture money and a founding team out of league of legends had bought that first weekend. what none of it bought was a second one. the peak at the end |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Project CARS 3 📖 2020 - 2026 electronic arts canceled the franchise in november 2022, more than three years before anyone switched the servers off. project cars 3 shipped in august 2020 with tire wear and pit stops taken out of a series whose entire identity had been simulation, and it sold 86 percent worse than the game before |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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NBA Live 19 📖 2018 - 2026 nba live 19 was the 22nd and final installment of ea's basketball series, released september 7, 2018 on ps4 and xbox one. it was developed by ea tiburon as a relaunch attempt after the cancelled nba live 20. metacritic 75/73, decent sales, no successor ever scheduled. ea pulled it from digital store |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers 📖 2019 - 2026 ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents bought two vouchers, each one redeemable for a full-price nintendo switch game off an approved list, which came to a twenty dollar saving if you were going to buy two anyway. nintendo announced the scheme on 15 may 2019 during a super mario maker 2 direct, o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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The Sims Mobile 📖 2018 - 2026 the sims mobile was ea's free-to-play phone version of the sims 4. it shipped worldwide in march 2018, topped the app store for a week, spent its eight years monetizing simcash and energy timers. ea stopped pushing new content in january 2024 and delisted the app a year later. the servers went dark |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Anthem 📖 2019 - 2026 anthem was bioware's bid at a destiny-style looter-shooter, built on an engine the studio could not bend, shipped in february 2019 in a state that critics treated as a betrayal of the bioware name. ea kept the servers running for almost five years past the cancellation of the planned overhaul. on 12 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Steam for Chromebooks 📖 2022 - 2026 steam for chromebooks was a four-year beta. google and valve ran the borealis project from march 2022 to january 2026, putting a native steam client inside a linux container on a small set of higher-end chromebooks with valve's proton handling the windows-to-linux translation. it never left beta. on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
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Tribe Nine 📖 2025 tribe nine landed 20 february 2025 as a mobile action rpg from kazutaka kodaka's too kyo games and akatsuki, a game spin-off of the 2022 anime built around extreme baseball in a neo-tokyo dystopia. it hit ten million downloads and briefly topped the japan app store free chart, then bled players fast |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Tarisland 📖 2024 - 2025 tarisland was tencent's cross-platform world of warcraft clone, developed by level infinite with locojoy and published worldwide under the level infinite label. the launch happened on 21 june 2024 on pc with simultaneous ios and android builds. the pitch was wow-style raiding on a phone screen, mark |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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FIFA 23 📖 2022 - 2025 fifa 23 shipped 30 september 2022, the last title ea would ship under the fifa brand after nearly three decades of the licensing deal. ultimate team plus every online mode ran on servers ea killed on 30 october 2025. the disc still boots into kick-off and career mode. everything you actually played |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Madden NFL 22 📖 2021 - 2025 madden nfl 22 shipped 20 august 2021 with tom brady and patrick mahomes on the box, first dual-cover madden the franchise had put out since madden 10 in 2009. ea tiburon rebuilt franchise mode around a staff- management skill tree, bolted on a home-field-advantage buff system, ran a nickelodeon cros |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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KartRider: Drift 📖 2023 - 2025 in 2007 roughly a quarter of south korea had played the original kartrider at least once. the sequel nexon built to replace it arrived on 12 january 2023, free on pc and on phones, and it never held a room. the global service closed on 27 february 2025 and the korean and taiwanese pc service followe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Need for Speed Rivals 📖 2013 - 2025 need for speed rivals shipped 15 november 2013 as the first nfs title ghost games ever built and the last one criterion co-developed. redview county open world, cop-versus-racer dual campaign, alldrive seamless matchmaking that folded the friend list into your traffic. ea killed the online layer 7 o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
NHL 21 📖 2020 - 2025 nhl 21 shipped 16 october 2020 for ps4 and xbox one with alex ovechkin on the cover, second time ovechkin had held the slot after nhl 07. ea vancouver rebuilt be-a-pro with dialogue choices and a cinematic presentation layer, added hut rush, kept world of chel as the ranked online mode. last ea spor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Star Wars: Hunters 📖 2024 - 2025 zynga put it on a nintendo direct stage in february 2021 and then shipped it in june 2024, three years and four months later, after two public delays. it was a squad arena shooter for switch and phones, set in the gap between the last two film trilogies, and it landed at a metacritic 57. the final c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Hike Rush 📖 2021 - 2025 hike rush was the second act of kavin bharti mittal, the founder who had built hike messenger to 100 million registered users during its 2012-2020 run before winding the messenger down in january 2021. the pivot became rush gaming universe, a mobile real-money gaming platform running 14 casual title |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Skyforge 📖 2015 - 2025 skyforge was the moscow-built free-to-play sci-fi mmo where you started as an immortal on the planet aelion and climbed a seventeen-class atlas until you became a literal god whose powers came from followers. it ran for ten years on a metacritic 52, then my.games handed the publishing rights to inno |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Blacklight: Retribution 📖 2012 - 2025 blacklight: retribution was a free to play shooter that shipped in 2012 with a visor you could switch on to see every enemy through every wall. it hit a million players in its first month and then spent seven years shrinking. the pc servers went off on 11 march 2019 with about sixty people playing o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Splitgate 📖 2019 - 2025 splitgate was 1047 games' arena shooter built on the portal mechanic of player-placed wormholes layered onto halo-style sci-fi combat. early access shipped on steam on 24 may 2019. the july 2021 console beta produced over 100,000 concurrents inside a week and 600,000 downloads. the 1.0 launch landed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Rockstar Games Social Club 📖 2008 - 2025 the shutdown announcement was a redirect. players noticed on 15 july 2025 that socialclub.rockstargames.com no longer went anywhere except the company homepage, and that was the entire notice. it opened alongside grand theft auto iv in april 2008 as a leaderboard and a stats page, became the crew ro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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XDefiant 📖 2024 - 2025 ubisoft built a shooter around one grievance, that call of duty had too much skill-based matchmaking, and shipped it without any. for about six weeks it worked. a million players in the first two and a half hours, eleven million by the end of june 2024. by august the concurrent count was under twent |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MultiVersus 📖 2022 - 2025 multiversus was a free-to-play platform fighter from player first games, published by warner bros. its appeal was a smash bros style brawler with bugs bunny, batman, arya stark, lebron james and shaggy in the same lobby. open beta launched 26 july 2022 and hit around 20 million players by september. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Dauntless 📖 2019 - 2025 dauntless was a free-to-play monster hunter analogue from phoenix labs. open beta started may 2018, retail launch september 26 2019 on pc, ps4 and xbox one with a peak number of around 15 million registered players across the run. blockchain firm forte labs bought phoenix labs in 2023. the awakening |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Ember Sword 📖 2018 - 2025 ember sword was a browser-based sandbox mmorpg from bright star studios (formerly so couch studios) in aarhus, denmark, led by ceo mark laursen. announced in 2018, it built its economy around ethereum-based nft land plots and a player-driven cosmetic marketplace. a 2021 land sale attracted about $20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Spectre Divide 📖 2024 - 2025 on 12 march 2025, two weeks after season 1 and the console launch, nate mitchell told players that mountaintop studios would close by the end of the week. spectre divide was a free 3v3 tactical shooter in which every player ran two bodies, funded by two rounds of $30 million. the servers stopped on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Whisky 📖 2023 - 2025 fifteen thousand github stars and thirty nine releases in two years, then isaac marovitz posted a maintenance notice and stopped. whisky was a swiftui front end for wine that let apple silicon macs run windows games without anyone opening a terminal. he ended it on 9 april 2025, partly because he ha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Splits.io 📖 2013 - 2025 ben carlsson started splits.io as a college project in 2013 and it became the place speedrunners kept their splits, the timing data that says which segment of a run went wrong and by how much. it never made money. games done quick agreed to fund it in october 2024, which called off a shutdown alread |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Urban Dead 📖 2005 - 2025 urban dead was the text-based browser zombie mmo kevan davis built and ran by himself from 3 july 2005 until 14 march 2025. players joined as survivors or zombies in a fictional quarantined city called malton, with a tile grid of suburbs and named buildings. each character earned one action point ev |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
NCAA Football 14 📖 2013 - 2025 a likeness lawsuit is what ended this one, not sales. ed o'bannon and sam keller sued in 2009 over college athletes appearing in ea's games without being paid, and in september 2013 ea announced there would be no 2015 edition, two months after ncaa football 14 shipped. so a game that sold over a mil |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Monolith Productions 📖 1994 - 2025 february 25 2025, warner bros. closed three of its game studios in one announcement, and monolith was the one with thirty years behind it. it made blood in 1997 and f.e.a.r. in 2005 before building the nemesis system into shadow of mordor, the one mechanic every other studio wanted and none of them |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
EA Sports UFC 3 📖 2018 - 2025 ea sports ufc 3 shipped 2 february 2018 with conor mcgregor on the cover, the third and longest-running of ea canada's four-title ufc run. seven years of online-support later, ea killed the servers 17 february 2025 and pulled the game from the ps store and xbox store on the same day. offline career |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Realm Royale 📖 2018 - 2025 105,440 people were playing it at the same time in june 2018, in its first week on steam early access. by the following month the weekend peak was seven thousand. hi-rez had pulled a battle royale mode out of paladins and shipped it as its own game while the genre was still the only thing the indust |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
The Elder Scrolls: Legends 📖 2017 - 2025 the elder scrolls: legends was bethesda's free-to-play digital collectible card game set in the tamriel universe, launched on windows on 9 march 2017 with macos and mobile ports later that same year. dire wolf digital built the original client. sparkypants studios took over development in may 2018. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
The Simpsons: Tapped Out 📖 2012 - 2025 tapped out was a springfield you built one donut at a time. ea shipped it on 1 march 2012 and ran it as a freemium city-builder for nearly thirteen years. servers off on 24 january 2025 after a september 2024 announcement. fans stood up project springfield the following march to keep the world playa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Rory McIlroy PGA Tour 📖 2015 - 2025 rory mcilroy pga tour shipped 14 july 2015 as the first ea pga tour title without tiger woods on the box since 1999. rebuilt on frostbite 3 for ps4 and xbox one, launched with only eight real courses, got mixed reviews for a stripped feature set. no sequel ever came, ea killed the online layer 16 ja |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Friday the 13th: The Game 📖 2017 - 2024 illfonic and gun media crowdfunded an asymmetric horror game where seven camp counselors ran from one jason voorhees, and it sold 1.8 million copies in its first three months. then the man who wrote the 1980 screenplay went to court to take his copyright back, and while that case ran nobody could li |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Disney Mirrorverse 📖 2022 - 2024 five million people installed it inside two months and the math still never closed. kabam turned mickey mouse into a sorcerer, gave every other disney character a combat redesign and a rarity tier, and took about thirty four million dollars across the whole run. purchases stopped on 17 september 202 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp 📖 2017 - 2024 nintendo put animal crossing on phones and hung leaf tickets off every timer in it. seven years of campsite decorating and fortune cookies produced more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in player spending. then on 28 november 2024 nintendo switched the online service off and four days late |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Armageddon MUD 📖 1991 - 2024 three people in urbana, illinois put a dikumud on the wire in 1991 and set it on zalanthas, a desert world where water is the currency and dying is permanent. thirty three years later it was down to about a hundred and fifty logins a week, kept going by people for whom it had long since stopped bein |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Guildlings 📖 2019 - 2024 asher vollmer made threes, co-founded a studio on the strength of it, and spent the money on an eleven-person adventure game about teenagers and a phone with a soul. it launched as an apple arcade exclusive in november 2019 to good reviews, sold too little to pay for a chapter two, and left the serv |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Synced 📖 2023 - 2024 synced was the free-to-play sci-fi co-op looter-shooter that next studios built and tencent's level infinite published in september 2023. it peaked at 10,272 concurrent players on steam right after launch, then lost ninety-nine percent of those players inside six months under a stack of server outag |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Concord 📖 2024 - 2024 concord was a sony first-party hero shooter from firewalk studios, eight years in development, launched on ps5 and pc on 23 august 2024. it sold around 25,000 copies in its first week and held about 700 concurrent steam players at peak. on 3 september sony announced full refunds, on 6 september the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mighty Doom 📖 2023 - 2024 on 7 may 2024 microsoft closed four game studios in one morning, and the smallest of them was a mobile shop in halifax called alpha dog games. the shutdown notice for its doom spin-off went out the same day. the game was sixteen months old and had taken about ten and a half million dollars from 7.6 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Ready at Dawn 📖 2003 - 2024 meta closed ready at dawn on 7 august 2024, four years after buying it and one year after switching off echo vr. long before any of that, the studio spent a decade making console-sized games for the psp, including two god of war entries that had no business running on a handheld with one analog nub. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Magia Record 📖 2017 - 2024 the mobile spinoff of puella magi madoka magica made by f4samurai and published by aniplex. the japanese mobile version launched on 22 august 2017 and ran for almost seven years. the english version arrived in june 2019, ran fifteen months, and shut down in october 2020. the japanese pc port on dmm |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
ArcheAge (Western) 📖 2014 - 2024 archeage was jake song's korean sandpark mmo, a sandbox-themepark hybrid released in korea in january 2013 and brought west by trion worlds in september 2014. across ten years the western publisher rotated three times, trion went under, gamigo took over, then kakao in 2021. kakao shut down the na an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Piranha Bytes 📖 1997 - 2024 piranha bytes made the same game for twenty three years, in bochum and then essen, with roughly the same small team the whole way through. gothic in 2001 was german in a way that mattered to the people who played it, stubborn and unfriendly at a moment when everything else was getting easier. the st |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
London Studio 📖 2002 - 2024 sony closed it on 21 may 2024, twenty two years after building it out of two teams it already owned. london studio's job for most of that time was selling the peripheral: a pair of usb microphones, or a camera sitting on top of the television. the last four years went into a live-service game set in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
The Wagadu Chronicles 📖 2023 - 2024 twin drums' afrofantasy mmorpg, an early-access d&d-5e-inspired mmo out of berlin funded on kickstarter and by riot forge. shipped into steam early access on 4 december 2023. the studio ran out of money six months later. servers closed on 18 may 2024, before a full release ever happened. some of the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
PangYa 📖 2004 - 2024 pangya was korean free-to-play golf with anime characters, a cash shop full of outfits, and a three click swing that said the word pangya at you when you landed it dead center. ntreev soft shipped it in june 2004 and licensed it out territory by territory, which is why it died territory by territory |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Nier Re[in]carnation 📖 2021 - 2024 square enix and applibot's mobile gacha set in the world of nier and nier: automata. the japanese version launched on 18 february 2021 and the western english/localized version on 28 july 2021. two and a half years later square enix announced the shutdown, ran a farewell content push with free daily |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Clash Mini 📖 2021 - 2024 eleven countries ever got to play this one. supercell put clash mini into beta in november 2021 as a board game version of its own characters, kept it there through two and a half years of reworks, then announced on 14 march 2024 that the game was good but not good enough to be a supercell game. ser |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Network 📖 2012 - 2024 nintendo network was the account system and online service sitting under the 3ds and the wii u, live from january 2012. it ran the eshop and the online multiplayer, and it introduced the first nintendo login that was a name rather than a twelve digit friend code. the shop stopped selling in march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Badge Arcade 📖 2014 - 2024 nintendo badge arcade was a crane machine bolted onto the 3ds home menu. it opened in japan on 17 december 2014 and reached the west in november 2015, handing you five free grabs and then charging a dollar for five more. what you won were badges, and a badge did nothing except sit on your home scree |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
StreetPass Mii Plaza 📖 2011 - 2024 every nintendo 3ds shipped with it and most owners opened it more often than anything they paid for. it collected the miis of strangers you had physically walked past with the lid closed, then paid you in puzzle pieces and a small role playing game where those strangers climbed a tower to rescue you |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood 📖 2014 - 2024 a game about becoming famous, sold by somebody famous. you started on the e-list and worked up by booking modeling jobs and going on dates that were also career moves, spending energy that refilled on a timer unless you paid to refill it now. it made forty three million dollars in its first quarter |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Super Mario Maker 📖 2015 - 2024 nintendo shipped the level editor it had built for its own designers and let strangers upload seven million courses to a shared server. uploads were frozen in march 2021 and the servers went off on 8 april 2024. what happened in between is the part worth keeping: a group of players called team 0% se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Warhaven 📖 2023 - 2024 nexon's free-to-play medieval hero shooter, a 32-player sword-based pvp game built at nexon korea. launched into steam early access on 20 september 2023 with a planned console rollout. audience never materialized. nexon announced the shutdown on 26 january 2024 and killed the live service on 5 april |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
The Crew 📖 2014 - 2024 the crew was an always online racing game across a shrunk united states, and it sold to twelve million players. on 31 march 2024 ubisoft turned off the servers and the game stopped working, including the parts one person played alone. the licenses were then pulled out of people's libraries, so buyer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Chimeraland 📖 2022 - 2024 tencent's level infinite published chimeraland globally on 15 july 2022, an open-world survival mmo of eastern mythology by pixel soft. the game launched on steam plus android and ios, drew a rocky reception, stopped receiving updates in september 2023, and shut down its global servers on 30 march 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Rocket Arena 📖 2020 - 2024 on 18 november 2023 rocket arena vanished from every digital store with no announcement attached, and the shutdown notice arrived four weeks after that. ea had published it in july 2020 as a 3v3 shooter where every weapon was a rocket launcher and nobody technically died, you got blasted out of the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Manyland 📖 2013 - 2024 a leap day ending, 29 february 2024, picked because there happened to be one to pick. philipp lenssen and scott lowe kept a browser universe running for ten years on a budget that eventually stopped covering it. everything inside was drawn by the people inside, which is why the closing notice counts |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Anyland 📖 2016 - 2024 over ten thousand areas and more than a quarter of a million hand-made objects, carried by two people on patron money until the server invoices stopped fitting inside it. philipp lenssen and scott lowe ran anyland in a headset and manyland in a browser tab, and both were closed on the same leap day. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
gotm.io 📖 2019 - 2024 a small swedish studio built the one thing the godot engine did not have: somewhere to put a web build where a stranger could click a link and be playing a second later. it was free, it compressed your uploaded game to a fraction of its size on the way in, and it ran a monthly jam that got past its |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Ntreev Soft 📖 2003 - 2024 ntreev soft was a korean studio with two games that mattered and twenty years of trying to find a third. it made trickster online in 2003 and pangya in 2004, then spent the rest of its life being owned by larger companies: ihq, then sk telecom, then ncsoft from 2012. it never turned a profit under n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
chess24 📖 2014 - 2024 chess24 arrived in 2014 into a market that already had a free giant and a commercial giant, and won a decade of relevance by not competing on the board at all. it competed on the camera. its grandmasters talked while they played, its tournament coverage was the one people actually left running, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Gran Turismo Sport 📖 2017 - 2024 thirteen million copies, and a deal with the fia, the body that sanctions formula one and had never put its name on a video game before. the catch was in the save file: gran turismo sport treated your progress as server property, so no connection meant no progress. sony switched the servers off at 0 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
World of Demons 📖 2021 - 2024 on 5 january 2024 platinumgames posted that service was ending, and gave no reason at all. the game came off apple arcade on the 18th and the copies already installed stopped working at the end of the month. because it only ever existed inside a subscription, there is no copy of it anywhere, and nob |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Propnight 📖 2021 - 2024 fntastic announced its own closure on 11 december 2023 and said in the same notice that the servers for its two games would keep running. ten days later propnight was pulled from sale, and on 22 january 2024 the servers went off. a game that sold nearly a million copies could not buy itself one extr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Riot Forge 📖 2019 - 2024 530 jobs went at riot games on 22 january 2024, and riot forge went with them. the label existed to pay outside studios to build single-player games in the league of legends world, six of them in four years, from ruined king in 2021 to bandle tale in 2024. bandle tale shipped in february, a month af |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
SINoALICE 📖 2017 - 2024 snow white and cinderella and alice live in a place called the library, and they murder each other to gather enough life essence to bring their authors back. that was the pitch, from yoko taro, on a free phone game published by square enix in june 2017. it broke its own servers on launch day and had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Versus Evil 📖 2013 - 2023 22 december 2023, three days before christmas, tinybuild laid off all thirteen people at versus evil and closed it. the baltimore label had spent ten years putting its name on games other people had crowdfunded, from the banner saga through pillars of eternity ii, and had been sold to tinybuild two |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
E3 📖 1995 - 2023 for twenty-five years the video game industry did its announcing in one building in los angeles during one week in june. e3 was where sony killed the saturn with a two-word price announcement in 1995, and where seventy thousand people filled the halls in 2005. then publishers worked out they could s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gundam Evolution 📖 2022 - 2023 bandai namco online built an overwatch-shaped shooter and cast it with gundam mobile suits, six a side, free to play. it launched on pc on 21 september 2022 and on consoles ten weeks later. reviews came back at 72, which is roughly the score a competent game gets when the thing it is competing again |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AusGamers 📖 1999 - 2023 mammoth media started it in brisbane in 1999, back when an australian pulling a demo off an american server was committing an afternoon to it. it came through the first dot com collapse intact and kept a files mirror that was the real reason most people had it bookmarked. the publication half outliv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
My Brute (La Brute) 📖 2008 - 2023 on 2 november 2023 motion twin switched off every web game it had, and my brute went with them. it was a flash fighting game from bordeaux that did the fighting for you. typing a name produced a random brute, and all that was left was to watch it win or lose. three fights a day was the cap. the way |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Pac-Man 99 📖 2021 - 2023 arika took the 1980 maze game and put ninety nine of them on one screen, where eating a ghost dropped an obstacle into somebody else's maze. it arrived on 7 april 2021 as a free benefit of a nintendo switch online subscription, which turns out to be the detail that matters most. nintendo and bandai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Achievement Hunter 📖 2008 - 2023 achievement hunter opened on 6 july 2008 as a database of written instructions for unlocking xbox achievements, built because geoff ramsey and burnie burns were competing over gamerscore in their spare time. by 2012 the guides were beside the point and the product was six people in an austin office |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
The Cycle: Frontier 📖 2019 - 2023 yager development made spec ops: the line, then spent three years turning a battle royale into an extraction shooter and launched it free on steam in june 2022. it peaked at 40,854 concurrent players that same month and never came close again. the servers could not hold the launch crowd, and by the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Elyon 📖 2020 - 2023 the mmorpg that spent three years hyped as ascent infinite realm before bluehole quietly pivoted the whole thing into a generic action mmo, kakao games killed the west inside a year of launch, and the last japanese server went dark september 2023. one of the shortest AAA MMO lifespans of the 2020s. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Volition 📖 1996 - 2023 the studio that made saints row, plus red faction and freespace before that, then got passed through thq and koch and deep silver and embracer for twenty-seven years before embracer's post-savvy-games restructuring killed it on august 31 2023. 183 people were laid off the day the lights went out. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Marvel Future Revolution 📖 2021 - 2023 netmarble built an open-world marvel game for phones and shipped it globally on 25 august 2021. it reviewed well and took an apple design award for innovation the following june. the updates got smaller after that. an october 2022 notice admitted the scale of service was being reduced, and netmarble |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Bazaar.tf 📖 2012 - 2023 valve's own api is what finished it. bazaar.tf ran from june 2012 to 3 august 2023 as a trading site for team fortress 2 items, built by two people who set out to beat tf2 outpost and did, outliving their target by five years. the operators announced the end on 27 july 2023 with a line saying that a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
The Silph Road 📖 2016 - 2023 niantic paid the bills for about a year and then stopped, and that was enough to end it. the silph road was the volunteer research network that worked out pokemon go's undocumented mechanics by collecting field observations from thousands of players and publishing the tables for free. the game resou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Evolve 📖 2015 - 2023 four hunters against one player controlling a monster that grew stronger the longer it stayed alive, which was a genuinely good idea, and turtle rock had earned the right to try it after left 4 dead. it shipped on 10 february 2015 carrying forty four separate paid skin packs and a stack of editions |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
JumpStart (online) 📖 2009 - 2023 knowledge adventure took the jumpstart cd-rom brand from the nineties and rebuilt it as a browser mmo for grade-schoolers in 2009. it ran for fourteen years, mostly ignored by the adult internet, and then jumpstart games announced on 13 june 2023 that everything was closing except neopets. servers w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
The Witcher: Monster Slayer 📖 2021 - 2023 half a million downloads in the first three days and over a hundred million monsters killed before the end, which reads like a hit and was not one. spokko, cd projekt's mobile studio, put the witcher into a location game that only really worked if you went outside at night, in the rain, in a country |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
GAME Atsumaru 📖 2016 - 2023 one of the games hosted here recorded 4.6 million plays and later went to steam. the platform under it did not make it that far. dwango opened game atsumaru inside niconico in november 2016 so anyone with rpg maker could publish something that ran in a browser tab, then closed it on 28 june 2023 bec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Knockout City 📖 2021 - 2023 knockout city was a team dodgeball game, bright and fast, where you caught and threw balls at the other side in tight arenas. velan studios made it and electronic arts published it in 2021 under the ea originals label. it drew over 12 million players early on, went free-to-play, and velan took over |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Pokémon Trading Card Game Online 📖 2011 - 2023 the pokemon company's own free client for its own card game, launched in march 2011 as a browser thing called trainer challenge and grown into a desktop and mobile client with a real economy inside it. every physical booster pack carried a code card that opened the same pack online, so the paper gam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Blaseball 📖 2020 - 2023 a sport nobody played and hundreds of thousands of people followed. blaseball simulated a full season of a fake baseball league every week in your browser, with a horror plot running underneath it. rogue umpires set players on fire while a giant malevolent peanut ruled the league, and on sundays the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PixelOpus 📖 2013 - 2023 an unannounced game with sony pictures animation was still in production when sony closed the studio making it. pixelopus opened in july 2013 as a student incubator, nine people, most of them straight out of carnegie mellon and san jose state. it shipped entwined in june 2014 and concrete genie in o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
CrossfireX 📖 2022 - 2023 fifteen months, start to finish. it arrived on xbox on 10 february 2022 carrying the name of a game with six hundred and fifty million registered players behind it and two single player campaigns written by remedy entertainment, and it landed at 38 on metacritic. smilegate announced the closure on 3 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Echoes of Mana 📖 2022 - 2023 four million downloads by september 2022, and the end was announced the following february. echoes of mana launched on 27 april 2022 as square enix's gacha entry in the mana series, developed by wright flyer studios, with a six character party system and a story reviewers found pleasant and thin. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Heardle 📖 2022 - 2023 one second of intro, a longer snippet for each miss, six tries to name the song. a small london studio put it online on 26 february 2022 in the wake of wordle and by march it was drawing 69 million visits a month. spotify bought it in july, ran it in six countries, and on 14 april 2023 said it would |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Storybook Brawl 📖 2021 - 2023 four magic: the gathering pros in olympia, washington built an auto battler out of fairy tale cards and put it into early access in june 2021. ftx bought the studio in march 2022 to bolt nfts onto it, and the steam rating fell from mostly positive to overwhelmingly negative in about the time it take |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Luminous Productions 📖 2018 - 2023 27 march 2018 to 1 may 2023 is five years and five weeks, and one game. square enix spun luminous productions out of the final fantasy xv team to build big-budget titles for a worldwide audience, lost its founding studio head inside seven months, shipped forspoken in january 2023 to reviews and sale |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
FileFront 📖 1998 - 2023 filefront was where you went to find the map, the mod, the patch. it died once in 2009 under ziff davis, came back, died again in 2016 under defy media, came back as gamefront, and then quietly stopped in 2023. the archive outlived the brand the way a graveyard outlives the village around it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow 📖 2017 - 2023 tinyco built a freemium city builder out of new new york, hired the show's own writers to script it, and got the original cast to voice it. that made a phone game the only place new futurama existed after the series ended in 2013. it ran for five years and ten months on episodic events and premium c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Dream SMP 📖 2020 - 2023 two youtubers opened a private minecraft server in april 2020 for a handful of friends and it turned into a serialized drama with thirty characters and twenty story arcs. the plot was improvised on top of loosely scripted beats, and it played out across dozens of simultaneous twitch and youtube stre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Love Live! School Idol Festival 📖 2013 - 2023 a phone rhythm game attached to an anime, which turned into the thing the anime was attached to. it launched in japan in april 2013, went worldwide in english a year later, passed forty million users by 2017 and took more money in japan than most of the franchise around it. klab and bushiroad ended |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls 📖 2011 - 2023 eleven years and four months on a platform built for flip phones. launched on dena's mobage in november 2011 as a card game with no animation and almost no rules, cinderella girls was earning over a billion yen a month within a year and eventually put nearly two hundred named idols into a franchise |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Rumbleverse 📖 2022 - 2023 iron galaxy built a battle royale with no firearms in it. forty players dropped into a city and hit each other with chairs until one was standing, and every building on the map could be climbed. epic games publishing put it out free in august 2022 and it never found the audience a live service needs |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Babylon's Fall 📖 2022 - 2023 platinumgames spent five years turning a bayonetta studio into a live service studio, and square enix published the result on 3 march 2022. the all-time steam peak was 1,188 concurrent players, reached the day after launch. by may the concurrent count touched one. the last story quest shipped at the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! 📖 2021 - 2023 king spent a crash bandicoot license on an endless runner and got the biggest launch week in its history outside candy crush. twenty seven million downloads in seven days. then a slow drain through 2021 and near silence through 2022. the game was pulled from both app stores in december with no annou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Order & Chaos 2: Redemption 📖 2015 - 2023 gameloft's beijing studio spent the first half of the 2010s building a world of warcraft for telephones, and then built it a second time. order & chaos 2: redemption shipped on 17 september 2015 with five races, a camera you could pinch to zoom, and a windows phone build almost nobody else was shipp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Stadia 📖 2019 - 2023 stadia was google's swing at netflix-for-games. it streamed up to 4k from a google data center to a chrome tab, with a wifi controller talking direct to google. it launched on 19 november 2019 in 14 countries, missed user and revenue targets within a year, shut its internal studios in february 2021, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier 📖 2021 - 2023 square enix said it had not been able to deliver the experience it hoped for, which is the standard sentence, and closed the first soldier on 11 january 2023 after fourteen months. the game put seventy five players into midgar thirty years before final fantasy vii, with tetsuya nomura directing and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Spellbreak 📖 2020 - 2023 proletariat spent three years building a battle royale with the guns taken out, where you wore an elemental gauntlet on one arm and picked the second one up off the floor. it launched free on 3 september 2020 and had five million players inside three weeks. blizzard bought the studio in june 2022 fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
ラストピリオド (Last Period) 📖 2016 - 2022 six and a half years in, happy elements switched the servers off at three in the afternoon on 27 december 2022, and five days before that it had already put an offline build of the same game on the stores with the whole story and the galleries inside it. the live title called itself the story of an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Draw Something 📖 2012 - 2022 draw something was a turn-based pictionary game where one player drew a word with their finger and another guessed it. omgpop launched it on february 6 2012 after years of pivots as a startup that had cycled through dozens of small games without a real hit. the app hit 50 million downloads inside fi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Dragalia Lost 📖 2018 - 2022 the one mobile game nintendo put out that was not attached to a character you already knew. cygames built it, nintendo published it, and for four years it ran a story past six hundred thousand words with a summoning screen paying the bills. the servers went off at six in the morning utc on 30 novemb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Onrush 📖 2018 - 2022 a racing game that deleted the finish line. twelve players, two teams of six, and a respawn system called the stampede that kept everybody inside the same pack whatever happened to them. codemasters evo was the evolution studios team sony had closed in 2016, and this was their answer to why racing g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Smash World Tour 📖 2020 - 2022 nintendo denied the license on 23 november 2022 and the largest grassroots super smash bros. circuit in the world ended six days later, ten days before its own championship weekend in san antonio. the 2022 smash world tour had run over 6,400 offline tournaments and put more than 325,000 players thro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Crowfall 📖 2015 - 2022 the whole design was about worlds that end. campaigns ran for a month or a year and then closed for good, and you carried what you had looted back to a private kingdom that was the only thing allowed to persist. it took six years and seven million crowdfunded dollars to get built, launched in july 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Square Enix Montréal 📖 2011 - 2022 three weeks. that is how long the studio lasted under the name onoma before embracer group walked into the office on 1 november 2022 and told the staff it was closing. square enix montréal had been open since november 2011 and had spent a decade turning the company's loudest action franchises into q |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Gaming (app) 📖 2020 - 2022 facebook gaming was meta's attempt to build a standalone twitch and youtube gaming competitor. the dedicated mobile app launched on android april 20 2020, pushed forward by the pandemic. it passed fifty million downloads but never crossed over into actual cultural relevance outside southeast asia. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Warhammer 40,000: Regicide 📖 2015 - 2022 seven years after release the servers went off and every store page vanished on the same day, 14 october 2022, and the announcement turned up five days later written as though it were happening that morning. hammerfall publishing, a small studio in sydney, had built chess with an initiative phase on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Kendall & Kylie 📖 2016 - 2022 two days after launch it was the number one free app in the american app store, and it held that spot for four days before slipping to number two. kendall & kylie arrived on 17 february 2016 as glu mobile's second celebrity game, running the loop its kim kardashian title had already proven: climb fr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Snap Games 📖 2019 - 2022 snap games was snapchat's in-app html5 gaming platform, announced at the april 2019 partner summit alongside a bitmoji-for-games sdk. the pitch was multiplayer titles launchable from a rocket button inside any group chat, no download, no sign-up, your bitmoji as your avatar. the launch slate include |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Heavy Metal Machines 📖 2017 - 2022 florianópolis, on the coast of santa catarina, is where hoplon spent nine years building a four against four car combat arena about carrying a bomb into the enemy base. it opened on steam early access on 31 january 2017 and set its all time concurrent record, 442 players, in that same first year. 80 |
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|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Jump Force 📖 2019 - 2022 bandai namco built it for weekly shonen jump's fiftieth anniversary and put forty characters from sixteen manga into one arena. it shipped in february 2019 to mixed reviews, most of them about a story and a hub world nobody had asked for. in november 2021 the publisher announced it was going away an |
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|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Killzone Shadow Fall 📖 2013 - 2022 guerrilla games switched off three sets of servers on 12 august 2022 and one of them belonged to the game that sold the playstation 4 on its first day. killzone shadow fall shipped on 15 november 2013 looking better than anything else on the shelf, with a multiplayer mode whose maps the studio gave |
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|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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High School Story 📖 2013 - 2022 a high school you built out of hangouts and students you recruited by clique, running on phones for nine years. pixelberry stopped writing new quests in june 2018 and kept the servers up for another four years anyway, which almost nobody does. on 10 august 2022 both it and hollywood u were switched |
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|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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EVE: Valkyrie 📖 2016 - 2022 it started as a hack week demo at an eve online fan convention in reykjavik, running on an early oculus dev kit, and it was the thing that convinced a lot of people in 2013 that virtual reality was actually back. ccp turned it into a real game and shipped it on 28 march 2016 as a launch title for th |
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|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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TERA 📖 2011 - 2022 tera was a korean action mmo that shipped non-target combat at a time when the genre was still mostly tab-target. it ran for eleven years, from the january 2011 korean launch to the june 30 2022 global pc shutdown coordinated between bluehole and gameforge. en masse entertainment had folded earlier |
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|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Heroes of Newerth 📖 2010 - 2022 heroes of newerth was the paid dota clone that landed between the end of dota allstars on the warcraft 3 engine and the launch of valve's dota 2. s2 games out of madison wisconsin shipped it on may 12 2010 at thirty dollars a box. it went free-to-play on july 29 2011 once league of legends made the |
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|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Survarium 📖 2015 - 2022 gsc game world closed in december 2011 and took stalker 2 down with it. the people who had been building that game founded vostok games in kyiv three months later and started over with a free shooter set in a world being eaten by a hostile forest. survarium never left early access. the closure was a |
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|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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PlayStation Now 📖 2014 - 2022 playstation now was sony's cloud-gaming subscription. it ran ps2, ps3 and ps4 games on rack servers in sony data centers and streamed the video to your console or pc. it launched on 28 january 2014 in north america on the back of the gaikai acquisition, hit about 3.2 million subscribers by march 202 |
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|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Hyper Scape 📖 2020 - 2022 ubisoft montreal put it out in july 2020, in the summer when everyone was indoors and every publisher wanted a battle royale. the idea it was actually built around was not the shooting, it was the audience: a twitch extension that let viewers vote to change the rules of a match while it was running. |
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|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Brave Frontier 📖 2013 - 2022 a-lim shipped brave frontier in japan on 3 july 2013 and gumi took it worldwide five months later out of singapore, which is how a japanese game ended up nominated in a made-in-singapore category. it ran nine years on unit fusion and rare summons and passed twenty million downloads by february 2015. |
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|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Club Penguin Rewritten 📖 2017 - 2022 two semi-anonymous students rebuilt club penguin a month after disney announced it was closing the original, and then ran the copy for five years while the official version stayed dead. it took eleven million registered accounts and thirty thousand new players a day at the pandemic peak, which is no |
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|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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F1 Delta Time 📖 2019 - 2022 four hundred and fifteen ether, about a hundred and thirteen thousand dollars, for a car that existed only as a token. f1 delta time held the official formula 1 license from march 2019 and sold virtual cars as ethereum collectibles long before the racing half of the game was ready. then the license |
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|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite 📖 2019 - 2022 wizards unite was Niantic's attempt to do Pokemon Go again with Harry Potter on top. same idea: walk around the real world with your phone up, find things layered onto the map, in this case magical creatures to catch and spells to cast. it launched in 2019 to a decent start and more than ten million |
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|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Assassin's Creed Identity 📖 2016 - 2021 a single player game with no offline mode is a rental, and ubisoft stopped paying the rent on 21 december 2021. identity sat in soft launch in new zealand and australia for seventeen months before going worldwide on ios on 25 february 2016, with android in may, and it was the first assassin's creed |
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|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Catan: World Explorers 📖 2020 - 2021 niantic announced it in 2019 and put it into early access in july 2020, in four countries and nowhere else. the idea was to lay catan's resource hexes over the actual planet and let you settle the streets you already walk down. the studio's own reason for killing it was that the design had drifted t |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Dr. Mario World 📖 2019 - 2021 nintendo took a 1990 puzzle game about pills falling down a bottle and made a phone game where the pills float up. released july 2019 in fifty nine territories with a stamina meter, a gacha for doctors and a premium currency called diamonds. two million downloads in the first seventy two hours produ |
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|2021-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Magic: Legends 📖 2021 - 2021 stephen ricossa had to write the sentence that the vision for this game had missed the mark, three months into its own open beta, after four years of development and a reveal at the game awards. the console versions were cancelled the same day. every dollar anyone had spent during the beta was refun |
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|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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ourWorld 📖 2008 - 2021 a flash virtual world where you built an avatar and played little games for coins and gems. flowplay ran it for thirteen years starting in 2008, long enough that it outlived the technology it was built on. when flash died the game got harder to run and easier to abuse. the paying players thinned out |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Astellia 📖 2019 - 2021 the announcement said 29 october 2021. the servers went off on the 18th instead and the steam post was edited to match, so the official closing date and the real one disagree by eleven days. astellia had launched in korea under nexon on 3 january 2019 and lost that publisher exactly twelve months la |
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|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Shift 2: Unleashed 📖 2011 - 2021 electronic arts pulled five need for speed games from every digital store on 31 may 2021 and turned their servers off three months later, with no warning before the store pages went. shift 2 was the best reviewed of the five and the least like the rest of the series: a circuit simulation whose signa |
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|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Gotham City Impostors 📖 2012 - 2021 warner bros. pulled the steam page on 26 august 2021 and said nothing about it to anybody. the game had been free to play since 2012, twelve players a match with one side dressed as batman and the other dressed as the joker. the playstation 3 servers were already gone, taken down in july 2014 when g |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Minecraft Earth 📖 2019 - 2021 minecraft earth was mojang's augmented reality game, announced in may 2019 and open to everyone by that december. it put buildplates and resources on a real world map and expected you to walk to them, which was the entire design. covid arrived four months after global launch and removed the walking. |
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|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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FIFA Online 3 📖 2012 - 2021 electronic arts built a football game in seoul that was never sold in a box, then gave it away and took the money back on player cards instead. nexon launched it in korea in december 2012 and within a year it was the second most played game in the country, with different publishers carrying it into |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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CUE! -See You Everyday- 📖 2019 - 2021 sixteen rookie voice actresses, several of them debuting here, were hired to play sixteen characters trying to become voice actresses, and the game they did it in lasted eighteen months. liber entertainment opened cue! on 25 october 2019 and announced its closure on 27 february 2021. the servers wen |
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|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Defiance 📖 2013 - 2021 defiance was an mmo trion worlds shipped on april 2 2013 to run in parallel with a syfy tv show that premiered fifteen days later. the transmedia experiment worked for one season, broke down when the show got cancelled in 2015, and the mmo ran on momentum for another six years before gamigo turned t |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Gears Pop! 📖 2019 - 2021 gears pop! put the gears of war cast into funko vinyl proportions and dropped them onto a clash royale playfield. it shipped on 22 august 2019, a month ahead of gears 5, and passed a million players inside a week. mediatonic announced the end on 29 october 2020, having already switched purchases off |
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|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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SIE Japan Studio 📖 2005 - 2021 sie japan studio was sony's oldest internal development group and it made ico and shadow of the colossus, later gravity rush, plus a large amount of the co-development behind games credited to other people. it did not go bankrupt and it was not sold. sony stopped renewing the annual contracts most o |
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|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Super Mario Bros. 35 📖 2020 - 2021 nintendo dropped thirty five people into the 1985 super mario bros. simultaneously and let them shovel goombas at each other. free for switch online members from 1 october 2020, and scheduled to die before it launched: the whole 35th anniversary lineup was announced as available only until the end o |
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|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Super Mario 3D All-Stars 📖 2020 - 2021 nine million copies in six months, and then nintendo pulled it on purpose. super mario 3d all-stars put three of the most important 3d platformers ever made on the switch for the franchise's 35th anniversary and shipped with an expiry date printed on the announcement: on sale until the end of march |
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|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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QuizUp 📖 2013 - 2021 quizup was an icelandic trivia app that put two strangers against each other over seven rounds of timed multiple choice. it took twenty million users within six months of launch and around eighty million by 2016, on the strength of more than 1,200 topics whose questions were written by volunteers. n |
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|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Battleborn 📖 2016 - 2021 gearbox shipped battleborn on 3 may 2016 as a hero shooter with a first-person moba layer. overwatch shipped three weeks later. by july the concurrent count on steam was under a thousand. gearbox and 2k turned the servers off on 31 january 2021 with no offline fallback, which means the disc is now a |
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|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Bin Weevils 📖 2007 - 2021 bin weevils was a british virtual world for children, a bin full of little weevils you dressed, fed through minigames, with a nest to decorate and garbage-themed areas to explore. it launched online around 2007, won a bafta kids' vote for best website in 2011, and passed twenty million users by 2013 |
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|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Twitch Sings 📖 2019 - 2021 twitch sings was a free-to-play streaming karaoke game co-developed by harmonix (the rock band studio) and twitch, released for windows and macos on 13 april 2019 after being announced at twitchcon 2018. the client shipped with over 2,000 licensed songs and was built specifically to broadcast to a t |
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|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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FarmVille 📖 2009 - 2020 the facebook game that defined the social-gaming era. you planted a virtual crop, you waited a real-world timer, you came back to harvest. if you forgot, your crop withered. millions of people set alarms. zynga rode it to an ipo. it ran on flash, and when adobe and facebook killed flash, farmville d |
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|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Flash games 📖 1998 - 2020 the browser games that ran in school computer labs, in office break rooms, on home dial-up connections after dinner. miniclip, addictinggames, kongregate, newgrounds, motion twin's catalog. when flash died on 31 december 2020, an entire genre of casual gaming died with it. ruffle has brought some ba |
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|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Stardoll 📖 2004 - 2020 the swedish virtual paper-doll site that became the dominant fashion-coded community for tween girls in the late 2000s. it began as paperdoll heaven, a personal hobby site liisa wrang built in 2004, was relaunched as stardoll in 2005, and at peak had registered hundreds of millions of accounts. flas |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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HEX: Shards of Fate 📖 2016 - 2020 wizards of the coast sued in may 2014, settled in september 2015 on terms nobody has ever published, and five years later the game announced its own closure using the word required. hex raised 2.28 million dollars on kickstarter in 2013 to build a trading card game with a persistent character and ca |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Ever, Jane 📖 2016 - 2020 five hundred dollars a month was the number. that is what the servers and the licenses cost for a jane austen online world, and in december 2020 the studio was at ten percent of it, with three weeks to find the rest. kickstarted in 2013 and opened to the public in august 2016, the game never did get |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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The Culling 📖 2016 - 2020 xaviant put sixteen players on an island in march 2016 and for a few weeks it was one of the most played games on steam. then playerunknown's battlegrounds arrived and fortnite behind it, and the studio answered by shipping a sequel into the middle of both. the culling 2 lasted eight days before it |
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|2020-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Crucible 📖 2020 - 2020 amazon spent six years building a free-to-play hero shooter, launched it on 20 may 2020, pulled it back to closed beta on 30 june, and cancelled it on 9 october. servers went dark on 9 november 2020. the whole retail life of the game was under three weeks. |
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|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Deathgarden 📖 2018 - 2020 behaviour interactive already had dead by daylight, so it built the same shape as a shooter. one invincible hunter carrying the only gun in the match, against five scavengers who had to capture control points to earn a way out and could not kill him back. it went into steam early access in august 20 |
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|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Kongregate 📖 2006 - 2020 kongregate was the flash games portal jim and emily greer launched in october 2006 as the english-language hub for embedded browser games. at peak it hosted over 124000 titles, paid out badges for completing them, and bred a generation of idle and clicker games starting with anti-idle and adventure |
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|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Pokémon Rumble Rush 📖 2019 - 2020 ambrella had been making the pokémon games nobody counts since hey you pikachu in 1998, and the rumble series of tap-and-collect toy battlers was its longest run. rumble rush was the fifth of them and the first on phones. it opened in may 2019 and the pokémon company switched it off on 22 july 2020. |
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|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Mobius Final Fantasy 📖 2015 - 2020 square enix put the final fantasy xiii team on a phone game and shipped it in japan on 4 june 2015, then worldwide the following august. it passed 20 million downloads by may 2019 and also ran on windows through steam, which is where the ending gets awkward. the japanese service closed on 31 march 2 |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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三國志曹操伝 ONLINE (Sangokushi Sōsōden Online) 📖 2016 - 2020 on 11 june 2020 at 11:00 the japanese servers went off, and the korean ones went with them the same day, which is not how regional shutdowns usually work. what ended was a phone remake of 三國志曹操伝, koei's 1998 windows tactical rpg about cao cao, rebuilt eighteen years later by a korean studio nexon ow |
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|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Dragon's Prophet 📖 2013 - 2020 runewaker built a taiwanese mmorpg on one good idea, that the dragons were there to be caught rather than killed, and then handed it to a series of publishers who took it apart a region at a time. sony online entertainment closed north america in november 2015. gamigo kept europe running for another |
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|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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MapleStory 2 📖 2015 - 2020 nexon's voxel-art sequel to the 2003 2d original. korea got it in 2015. the global version launched october 2018 with a cosmetic-only cash shop and a minecraft-shaped aesthetic that was supposed to bring back the audience that had aged out of the original. by may 2020 the global west was done. korea |
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|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Sega Heroes 📖 2018 - 2020 sega heroes was a match-3 puzzle-rpg mobile game that ran 68 characters from 15 sega franchises through a candy-crush-style grid. demiurge studios developed it for sega and shipped on 14 november 2018. servers closed 21 may 2020 because demiurge and sega had decided to part ways and demiurge wanted |
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|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Gameplanet 📖 2000 - 2020 it grew out of the first counter-strike server in new zealand and became the place the country read about games for twenty years. mighty ape took a controlling stake in 2016, once advertising had stopped paying for the writing, and advertising never started paying again. the site was switched off in |
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|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Sansar 📖 2017 - 2020 linden lab spent four years building sansar as a clean and vr-capable second life. it launched in public beta on july 31 2017, hit a steady but small user base, and got sold to wookey project corp on march 23 2020 so that linden lab could go back to running its 2003-vintage flagship. wookey ran out |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Duelyst 📖 2016 - 2020 a card game where the cards had to stand somewhere. duelyst put a 9 by 5 grid under the whole genre so that position mattered as much as the deck. it was very good and almost nobody played it. through 2019 its peak on steam was under a hundred players a day. counterplay games switched the servers of |
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|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Spil Games 📖 2001 - 2020 190 million people a month were playing browser games on spil games sites in 2012, across more than fifty portals in twenty languages, and almost none of them could have named the owner. the company was dutch, founded in hilversum in 2001, and its method was to buy the obvious domain and fill it: sp |
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|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Microsoft Internet Games 📖 2000 - 2020 windows shipped with a backgammon board that could find you an opponent in another country, and for twenty years it did exactly that. there was no chat, only a menu of canned lines, which is the reason it worked across every language at once. microsoft switched off the xp and me servers on 31 july 2 |
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|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Tanki X 📖 2016 - 2020 the players would not move. alternativaplatform spent years building a unity client to carry tanki online past flash, shipped it on steam in april 2017, and then watched the audience stay exactly where it was. running two tank games for one crowd in perm was not affordable, so the newer one went. se |
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|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Monster Hunter Frontier Z 📖 2007 - 2019 capcom took monster hunter off the living room floor and put it on a japanese pc server in june 2007, then charged a monthly fee to play it, which no other game in the series has ever asked for. it ran twelve and a half years across six platforms and two named expansions, and it never once left asia |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Plays.tv 📖 2015 - 2019 dennis fong called it instagram for gamers, which in 2015 meant a windows client that sat behind your game recording everything and let you keep the last twenty seconds with one key. raptr launched it on 31 march 2015 on the back of a $14 million round led by amd, spun it out as its own company in j |
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|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Moshi Monsters 📖 2008 - 2019 moshi monsters was the london kid mmo from mind candy. you adopted one of six monsters, raised it inside monstro city, earned rox by solving small puzzles and bought clothes and furniture for your room. mind candy launched it on 16 april 2008. by 2014 the registered user count had passed eighty mill |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Dragon's Dogma Online 📖 2015 - 2019 capcom took the pawn system from dragon's dogma, the one where your companion learns how you fight and other players borrow it while you are offline, and rebuilt it with actual people in the party slots. free to play, japan only, never translated. a million downloads in the first month and three sea |
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|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Pigg World 📖 2012 - 2019 december 2016 is when pigg world stopped getting anything new, and it kept running for three more years anyway. cyberagent built it as a town building game inside the ameba pigg universe, where you played the mayor and every road you laid cost stamina you then had to wait for. flash is what closed i |
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|1997-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Human Head Studios 📖 1997 - 2019 twenty-two years of independence ended the day after rune ii went on sale. six people out of raven software set up in madison, wisconsin in 1997 and spent two decades as the studio other companies handed their difficult projects to. human head finished prey after eleven years of that game failing to |
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|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Star Ocean: Anamnesis 📖 2016 - 2021 square enix built a mobile gacha game to celebrate twenty years of star ocean and filled it with characters from every entry in the series, with motoi sakuraba writing the music. in japan it took three million downloads inside three weeks. the english version launched in july 2018 and was switched o |
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|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Portalarium 📖 2009 - 2019 richard garriott started portalarium in austin in september 2009 and spent its first years on facebook games, one of them a zynga collaboration about garage sales. in 2013 he took shroud of the avatar to kickstarter and raised nearly two million dollars from twenty-two thousand people who wanted ult |
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|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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AlphaDream 📖 2000 - 2019 tetsuo mizuno had been square's second president and chihiro fujioka had co-directed super mario rpg, and in january 2000 the two of them opened a studio in tokyo to keep making that kind of game for nintendo. seven mario & luigi titles came out of it between 2003 and 2018, reviewed well the whole w |
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|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Worlds Adrift 📖 2018 - 2019 worlds adrift was a physics sandbox mmo set on floating islands, where you scavenged wrecks for parts and welded your own airship out of them. it was the first commercial game running on improbable's spatialos, which promised one continuous simulated world instead of a hundred identical shards. boss |
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|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Atlas Reactor 📖 2016 - 2019 twenty seconds was how long each player had to lock in a move, and then all eight moves resolved at once. trion worlds released atlas reactor on 4 october 2016 and changed its price model twice in the first year. gamigo bought trion in october 2018 and switched the servers off on 28 june 2019, sayin |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Minecraft: Story Mode 📖 2015 - 2019 about twenty five people were still at telltale after the september 2018 layoffs, and one of the jobs they stayed on to finish was the netflix version of minecraft: story mode. the game itself came off every store on 25 june 2019, and people who had paid for a season could no longer download the epi |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Tetris Friends 📖 2008 - 2019 honolulu, january 2006: the people who own tetris set up tetris online, inc. to be the official game on the internet, and tetrisfriends.com was the result, flash in the browser with a login and an ad before each match. a million registered players by april 2010. the licensee closed on 31 may 2019 an |
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|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Age of Empires: Castle Siege 📖 2014 - 2019 17 september 2014: microsoft put the age of empires name on a free-to-play castle builder and launched it, of all places, on windows 8.1 and windows phone. smoking gun interactive built a competent clash of clans with trebuchets on it, ios and android came later, and none of it mattered once redmond |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Shockwave.com 📖 1999 - 2019 the game portal that ran on the shockwave plugin, the older sibling of flash. launched by macromedia in 1999. peak 22 million users by 2005. it hosted everything from arcade ports to original 3D games disney and lego could not host themselves. it died functionally on 9 april 2019 when adobe pulled t |
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|2016-|
| 2019|
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Orcs Must Die! Unchained 📖 2016 - 2019 patrick hudson, the ceo of robot entertainment, opened the closing letter with the words it's painful to even write this. unchained was the free-to-play third orcs must die game, sold as a beta from 2014 and fully released in april 2017. it ran at a loss for many months and went dark on 8 april 2019 |
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|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Microsoft Hover! 📖 1995 - 2019 the bumper-car capture-the-flag game microsoft bundled on the windows 95 cd-rom edition to justify the new disc format. three maze worlds, a red hovercraft, a soundtrack by stan lepard that still lives in 90s memory. microsoft brought it back as a webgl remake in august 2013 for the windows 95 twent |
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|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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DJMax Technika Q 📖 2013 - 2019 neowiz pulled a rhythm game off both app stores on 28 february 2019 and switched off its servers a month later. technika q was the phone version of a korean arcade cabinet you played by dragging notes across a touchscreen, and it ran five and a half years. players who had bought songs asked for an o |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Sailor Moon Drops 📖 2015 - 2019 three million downloads across three and a half years was not enough to keep a match-three puzzle alive on one of the most recognizable licenses in anime. capcom's mobile studio built it, bandai namco published it, and the servers went off on 28 march 2019 at three in the morning utc. a petition ask |
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|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Drawn to Death 📖 2017 - 2019 jaffe made god of war and twisted metal, then left sony to start his own studio and came back with a four player arena shooter drawn to look like a bored teenager's exercise book. sony put it out on 4 april 2017 as a free playstation plus title, which is the widest distribution a small game will eve |
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|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Ace of Spades 📖 2011 - 2019 ben aksoy put a free voxel shooter online in april 2011, terrain you could dig through and rifles pointed at other people digging. two and a half million installs later jagex bought it, rebuilt it, and charged ten dollars for a version the players liked less than the free one. jagex pulled it from s |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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WWE Immortals 📖 2015 - 2019 warner bros took the injustice: gods among us mobile game, pulled batman out of it and put the undertaker in, then let the concept artists go as far as they wanted. wwe superstars came back as demons and demigods with three-on-three card fights attached. in-app purchases ended on the last day of 201 |
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|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Marvel Avengers Academy 📖 2016 - 2019 4 february did a lot of work in this one. the game launched on that date in 2016, and on the same date two years later it tore out its own city-building loop and replaced it with stamina and permanent combat maps. the servers went off on 4 february 2019. tinyco built it under jam city, and marvel li |
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|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Battlestar Galactica Online 📖 2011 - 2019 a licensed 3d space combat mmo that ran inside a browser tab, built in oslo by artplant and published out of hamburg by bigpoint. you picked colonial or cylon and you were locked to it. two million registered users showed up inside three months, because the distance between hearing about the game an |
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|2002-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Aapeli.com 📖 2002 - 2019 finland had a browser game site that market research once placed second among young people's best known online brands, behind google and ahead of everything else on the list. aapeli opened on 10 october 2002 with java and flash games, went abroad under the name playforia in sixteen languages, and pa |
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|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Angry Birds Go! 📖 2013 - 2019 130 million people downloaded a free angry birds kart racer and most of the writing about it is about the upgrade counter. exient built it for rovio and it landed on 11 december 2013, praised for how it drove and buried for everything attached to the currency. rovio pulled it off the stores in the s |
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|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Skylanders 📖 2011 - 2018 toys for bob shipped skylanders spyro's adventure in october 2011 with a portable game console accessory, a plastic spyro figurine, and a portal-of-power that read the figurine's nfc chip. the format invented a category. over five years the franchise sold $3 billion of plastic figurines. then the ca |
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|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Zhengtu Online 📖 2006 - 2018 shi yuzhu built a game in shanghai that cost nothing to enter and then charged for everything inside it. zhengtu went into open beta in november 2005 promising to stay permanently free, and by march 2007 it was holding 860,265 players online at the same moment. the money came from a chest that showe |
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|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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World of Speed 📖 2017 - 2018 announced in february 2014 and not playable until august 2017, by which point the studio that announced it had moved on and saber interactive was finishing the job. it was a team-based racing mmo with about fifty licensed cars and street circuits traced over real cities. early access ran sixteen mon |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Call of Duty: Heroes 📖 2014 - 2018 on 22 december 2018 the servers stopped answering and a call of duty game became unopenable on every phone that still had it installed. heroes arrived in november 2014 as activision's answer to clash of clans, with captain price and soap mactavish demoted to commandable units you upgraded between ba |
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|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Super Best Friends Play 📖 2011 - 2018 on sunday 16 december 2018 a video called "super best friends (final)" went up, and woolie madden's segment gave the reason in one line: matt and pat are no longer friends. the channel had started in 2011 as a machinima series about two men from montreal arguing over a kirby game, and it finished wi |
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|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Infinity Blade 📖 2010 - 2018 infinity blade was the game that proved an iphone could run unreal engine 3, made by twelve people at chair entertainment and released on 9 december 2010 for six dollars. it took more than a million and a half dollars in four days and was the fastest-grossing app on the store at the time. epic remov |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Guitar Hero Live 📖 2015 - 2018 activision's fix for a genre it had already worn out was to stop selling songs and start broadcasting them. guitar hero live shipped in october 2015 with a six-button guitar and a streaming mode called ghtv, where the note track sat on top of the original music video and you joined whatever was play |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Extrasolar 📖 2014 - 2018 nine hundred dollars a month was the running cost of an imaginary planet. extrasolar gave you a rover on epsilon prime and a camera to point, and the photograph came back hours later because it was rendered on a server somewhere rather than on your own machine. the story arrived around those picture |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown 📖 2015 - 2018 six thousand and three people put $558,863 into a shadowrun mmo in august 2012. what shipped in april 2015 was a turn-based tactics game that could not be played offline, because the license microsoft granted covered online play only. three years after that the license ran out, microsoft did not ren |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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WildStar 📖 2014 - 2018 wildstar was carbine studios' science-fantasy mmo for ncsoft, shipped on june 3, 2014 with a subscription model and a sharp art style. the subscriber base did not hold. it converted to free-to-play on september 29, 2015 and limped along for three more years on consolidated servers. ncsoft announced |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Sonic Jump Fever 📖 2014 - 2018 sega's british mobile studio shipped this on 10 july 2014 as the follow-up to sonic jump, a vertical climber you steered by tilting the phone. it passed ten million installs on android and reviewed at 54 on metacritic, which is about where a free score treadmill on a twice-weekly leaderboard cycle l |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Just Survive 📖 2015 - 2018 daybreak put h1z1 on steam early access in january 2015 and sold a million copies in two months. in 2016 it cut the game in half, sending the battle royale mode off under its own name and leaving the original survival game behind as just survive. one half went on to be a stadium esport. the other lo |
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|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Everyplay 📖 2012 - 2018 unity bought everyplay in 2014 to turn gameplay video into a checkbox in the build settings, then switched the hosting off four years later with 38 million videos sitting on it. the sdk was in roughly 300 games and most of the people using it never learned the name, which is how a replay button is s |
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|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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TF2 Outpost 📖 2011 - 2018 2011 was the year valve made team fortress 2 free and the hats became the actual economy. outpost was where you posted what you had against what you wanted, with the price quoted in crate keys, and then you waited for a stranger to add you on steam. zam network bought it and ran it next to wowhead u |
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|2004-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Telltale Games 📖 2004 - 2018 telltale was founded in july 2004 by three former lucasarts adventure-game devs in san rafael, california. the walking dead season one in 2012 turned the studio into a forty-million-dollar-a-year operation built on licensed episodic series. the studio took on too many ips at once, missed delivery da |
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|2004-|
| 2018|
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Capcom Vancouver 📖 2004 - 2018 158 people lost their jobs on 18 september 2018, when capcom closed the only development studio it had outside japan. the building had opened in burnaby in 2004 as blue castle games, doing licensed baseball, and capcom bought it outright nine days before dead rising 2 reached shelves. four dead risi |
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|2005-|
| 2018|
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QQ Pet 📖 2005 - 2018 qq pet lived in the corner of the qq instant messenger. you fed it, played with it, sent it to school, watched it grow. it was tencent's tamagotchi inside a chat window, and for the chinese millennial generation it was a permanent fixture of the desktop. by 2018 the desktop was no longer the center |
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|2017-|
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LawBreakers 📖 2017 - 2018 cliff bleszinski left epic games in 2012 and came back with boss key productions in 2014 to build lawbreakers, a zero-gravity hero shooter that shipped 8 august 2017. nexon published it. reviews were decent, the launch peaked around three thousand concurrent on steam and fell under a hundred within |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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GameFly Streaming 📖 2015 - 2018 gamefly streaming was the second life of a dvd-by-mail rental company. it launched in april 2015 on amazon fire tv, then expanded to samsung smart tvs and a few other set-top devices. the catalogue stayed small, the subscription stayed cheap, the audience stayed quiet. in may 2018 ea bought the clou |
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|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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FunOrb 📖 2008 - 2018 funorb was jagex's casual-games portal for the runescape crowd, launched in february 2008 with a few dozen java titles like arcanists and armies of gielinor. it ran the same freemium model as runescape, free tier with ads and a members tier at around 5 dollars a month for fullscreen and full achieve |
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|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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RuneScape Classic 📖 2001 - 2018 the original RuneScape, before RuneScape 2 (2004) and Old School RuneScape (2013) split the player base into three distinct games. classic ran for 17 years before jagex finally turned the servers off in august 2018. it was the first major MMO that ran in your web browser. you logged in through a jav |
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|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Puzzle Fighter (2017) 📖 2017 - 2018 20 april 2018 is when capcom announced it was switching puzzle fighter off, five months after putting it out. the mobile reboot of super puzzle fighter ii turbo had launched worldwide on 22 november 2017 with street fighter and resident evil characters dropping gems on each other, plus a gem shop an |
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|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Titanfall: Assault 📖 2017 - 2018 eleven months and twenty days after launch, every server for titanfall's only mobile game went dark. respawn and a studio called particle city had taken a shooter known for wall-running and dropped mechs and rebuilt it as a top-down card battler in the clash royale shape, with nexon publishing. the |
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|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Gas Powered Games 📖 1998 - 2018 chris taylor came out of cavedog with total annihilation behind him and started gas powered games in redmond in may 1998. dungeon siege and supreme commander were both built in that office, and so was a kickstarter for an action game called wildman that got pulled four days before it would have ende |
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|2018-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Radical Heights 📖 2018 - 2018 boss key productions had one commercial failure behind it and about five months to answer it, so radical heights went onto steam in april 2018 as an unfinished 1980s game show with bmx bikes and cash falling out of the sky. it peaked at 9,905 concurrent players and was under a thousand within weeks. |
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|2017-|
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|_____|
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Mirage: Arcane Warfare 📖 2017 - 2018 torn banner had sold millions of copies of chivalry, so it followed with the same first person melee combat plus spellcasting, in a setting borrowed from persian myth. reviewers said the fighting was good and there was nobody left to fight. the studio gave the game away free for a day in september 2 |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Loadout 📖 2014 - 2018 edge of reality shipped it on steam on 31 january 2014 as a free third-person shooter whose actual product was the gun builder. you assembled weapons out of parts and the game rendered whatever ugly thing you had made. it reviewed well enough and it held a small crowd for four years. then the genera |
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|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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vSide 📖 2007 - 2018 a 3d virtual world built around music and looking cool, the kind of place teenagers logged into after school to stand around a broadcast dj set. doppelganger made it, exitreality bought it in 2009 and then mostly left it alone, and the licensed music got swapped for shoutcast radio. it limped for ye |
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|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Tunngle 📖 2009 - 2018 tunngle was a virtual lan. it installed a network driver that made a room of strangers on the internet look to your computer like machines plugged into the same switch, so any game with a lan mode and no online servers worked anyway. open beta started in early 2009 out of a small german company, and |
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|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Paragon 📖 2016 - 2018 paragon was epic games' third-person moba, built on unreal engine 4, with a real early-access following in 2016 before it lost the studio's attention. epic put its people onto fortnite, and paragon never found the audience to justify running alongside it. epic shut the servers on april 26 2018 and, |
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|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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SmallWorlds 📖 2008 - 2018 smallworlds launched in 2008 from auckland, new zealand. outsmart games built a flash-based browser virtual world aimed at teenagers and young adults, with an audience that ended up around 65 percent female. peak traffic in july and august 2012 was around 3.8 million visits across the period. flash' |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Steam Machine 📖 2015 - 2018 steam machine was valve's bet that a linux pc with a steam controller could replace the xbox in the living room. fourteen pc vendors built the first wave that shipped in november 2015. fewer than half a million units moved in the first seven months. valve quietly removed the steam machine link from |
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|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Apparatus 📖 2011 - 2018 the swedish android sandbox puzzle game from 2011. you used a hammer to pin planks and wheels together. you connected motors and batteries. you tried to get a blue marble into a basket. peak was around 2012, when google made it editor's choice. removed from google play in early 2018. the community s |
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|2004-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII 📖 2004 - 2018 square enix built a real final fantasy for japanese phones in 2004, an action rpg about the turks, set six years before the events of final fantasy vii, directed by hajime tabata with characters by tetsuya nomura. you generated materia by taking a photograph with your phone camera and the game read |
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|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Gran Turismo 6 📖 2013 - 2018 december 2013 was a strange month for a flagship. the playstation 4 had been on sale for three weeks and polyphony shipped gran turismo 6 for the machine it replaced, with 1,200 cars and a lunar rover you could drive along the apollo 15 route at hadley rille. it sold 5.01 million copies anyway. sony |
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|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Devilian 📖 2015 - 2018 a korean studio built an isometric action rpg with an mmo bolted around it, where your character had a human form and a devil form that leveled separately. trion worlds put it out in the west in december 2015 and it reviewed as fine, which is the worst possible score for a free game that needs a cro |
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|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Caller's Bane 📖 2013 - 2018 bethesda's lawyers looked at a card game from the minecraft studio and saw the elder scrolls. notch offered to settle it with a quake 3 match and got no reply, so mojang settled in court instead: keep the name for this one game, hand over the trademark, never use it again. the servers went off on 13 |
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|2015-|
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|_____|
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Oddshot 📖 2015 - 2018 twitch shipped clips in may 2016, and oddshot had twenty-one months left after that. a small helsinki company had built the thing everyone used to save a forty second moment off a live stream, and then the platform built the same thing in natively and gave it away. ad blockers took the revenue plan |
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|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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PVP Live 📖 2012 - 2018 the goodbye was addressed to the #pvpfam and it ran four sentences. pvp live had been an esports news operation out of frisco, texas since 2012, with about two million dollars of private funding behind it. in 2015 it announced a hearthstone pro league carrying a sixty thousand dollar prize pool and |
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|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Rock Band Network 📖 2010 - 2018 harmonix opened the rock band network on 4 march 2010 so bands could author their own songs into the game and sell them, splitting the revenue instead of waiting on a licensing department. it took reaper, a compiler called magma and a queue of volunteer reviewers checking that every chart was actual |
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|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Master X Master 📖 2017 - 2018 two hundred and twenty four days is how long the global version lasted. ncsoft's moba let you bring two characters into a match and swap between them mid-fight, and it filled out the roster from the company's own back catalog, rytlock out of guild wars 2 and jinsoyun out of blade & soul. it reviewed |
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|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Anno Online 📖 2013 - 2018 blue byte built an anno game that ran inside a flash plugin, on the engine behind die siedler online, and it was good enough to win the deutscher entwicklerpreis for best browser game in 2013. then development stopped on 18 october 2016. the cash shop came out, players were told to spend whatever ru |
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|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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GAZOO METAPOLIS 📖 2008 - 2018 mamoru oshii, the director of ghost in the shell, supervised a virtual city built by a car company for young japanese people who were no longer buying cars. the beta opened on 17 april 2008 and the full world that october, running inside meet-me, a 3d tokyo operated by a small studio called cocoa. i |
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|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Perpetuum 📖 2010 - 2018 ten people in budapest spent five years building a single-shard sandbox mmo where you drive a robot across an alien planet and the economy is entirely other players. perpetuum launched on 25 november 2010 with a subscription and dropped it in 2014, having never found enough people to pay for the har |
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|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Bitsquid 📖 2009 - 2018 two engineers out of the collapsed studio grin started a game engine in stockholm in 2009 and sold it to autodesk five years later. autodesk renamed it stingray, could not take ground from unity or unreal, and ended sales and development on 7 january 2018. arrowhead shipped helldivers 2 on it in feb |
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|2001-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Motion Twin (Flash era) 📖 2001 - 2017 a small french collective that made hammerfest, mush, dinoparc, and a stack of other browser games in the early 2000s. the flash games died when flash died. the same team is still alive making dead cells. the original motion twin is not coming back. |
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|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Meez 📖 2006 - 2017 meez was a teen virtual world made in san francisco for an american audience. ninety percent of its users lived in the us. burak was twenty-two and halfway through a turkish engineering degree when it launched, on the wrong side of both the age and the longitude of its core demographic. |
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|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Pyro Studios 📖 1996 - 2017 pyro studios was a madrid company that made a world war two tactics game nobody had asked spain for and sold five million copies of the series. commandos ran on a fixed camera and a visible cone of vision, with six men who each did exactly one job. the studio spent the 2000s trying to be something l |
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|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Hello Kitty Online 📖 2008 - 2017 hello kitty online was a free-to-play mmorpg out of hong kong, made by sanrio digital with typhoon games, built around farming and crafting instead of combat, with brooms and flyswatters where the swords would normally go. closed beta opened on 23 april 2008 and drew more than fifty thousand applica |
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|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Origami Flowers 📖 2009 - 2017 the small mobile flower-growing series. you tended an origami rose, daisy, iris, orchid, sunflower, or tulip. the games connected to a shared server, which made it something close to a small flower-growing MMO. peak was 2009 to 2013. the server shut down for good on 11 december 2017. the apps still |
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|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online 📖 2015 - 2017 a july 2017 patch called renewal is what finished this one off. nexon and neople built a free-to-play shooter inside the ghost in the shell: stand alone complex continuity, opened steam early access on 14 december 2015 and left early access the following july. renewal restricted which weapons each c |
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|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Marvel Heroes 📖 2013 - 2017 marvel heroes was diablo by another name with the full marvel roster as playable characters, and for four years it actually worked. then sexual-misconduct allegations against gazillion's ceo surfaced, and disney revoked the license. the studio liquidated faster than the announced shutdown date, and |
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|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Kamcord 📖 2012 - 2017 kamcord began as a piece of code that game developers dropped into their own apps so a player could record the last thirty seconds of play and post it without leaving the game. close to five hundred games carried it. in 2015 the company threw that away and turned itself into a live streaming app for |
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|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Visceral Games 📖 1998 - 2017 visceral games started in 1998 as ea redwood shores, an internal ea studio working on tiger woods golf and bond licensed games. the dead space pitch came out of an internal prototype in 2005 and shipped in october 2008 as the studio's defining title, a third-person sci-fi horror game on the alien is |
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|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Xbox Live Indie Games 📖 2008 - 2017 xbox live indie games (xblig) was microsoft's hobbyist-developer storefront on the xbox 360, announced at gdc 2008 and launched on 19 november 2008 as part of the new xbox experience dashboard update. developers used xna game studio (the c# game framework microsoft shipped from 2004) to build games |
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|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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IndieBox 📖 2014 - 2017 indiebox took games that only existed as steam downloads and made them physical again, one a month, in cardboard boxes built to look like 1990s pc software. twenty dollars got you a drm-free copy on disc, a printed manual, a soundtrack cd and something collectible that only existed in that box. it s |
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|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Tactical Intervention 📖 2013 - 2017 minh le made counter-strike in a bedroom in 1999 and spent the following decade in seoul making this. tactical intervention came out free to play on 28 march 2013 with highway car chases and a dog you could send at people, and its first publisher closed the servers ten weeks later. a second company |
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|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Raptr 📖 2008 - 2017 raptr was a gaming overlay and activity tracker built by dennis fong, the ex-xfire founder. it auto-detected what game you were playing, tracked your hours, and suggested driver settings. amd bundled it as the gaming evolved app from 2014 on. amd dropped the partnership in october 2016. raptr shut i |
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|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Breath of Fire 6 📖 2016 - 2017 capcom's network game conference in august 2013 is where the series ended, though the dying took four more years to finish. the sixth breath of fire, the first since dragon quarter in 2002, was a japan-only free-to-play online rpg for phones and windows, released in episodes and paid for by microtra |
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|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Happy Farm 📖 2008 - 2017 happy farm is the original that most of the world only met through its copy. from november 2008 it let chinese social-network users plant crops and, once they ripened, sneak onto a friend's farm at night to steal the harvest. that last part, the stealing, is what made it addictive and famous. it hit |
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|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Emil Chronicle Online 📖 2005 - 2017 headlock built a japanese mmorpg around characters who stayed small and cute while the numbers behind them got very large. gravity and broccoli put it on japanese servers on 24 november 2005, and it ran on pets and marionettes where its competitors ran on gear ladders. the licenses went out region b |
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|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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CrimeCraft 📖 2009 - 2017 a box on the shelf at best buy, a monthly fee behind it and sponsored advertising inside the game itself. that was the launch model in august 2009 and it lasted about eight weeks before vogster tore it up. what survived was a decent third-person shooter wrapped around a gang-warfare city, handed to |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Firefall 📖 2010 - 2017 a free-to-play sci-fi mmo shooter that took six years to ship and less than three to run. red 5 studios burned through its money, fired the whole dev team in mid 2016, then posted a 24-hour shutdown notice in july 2017. the mobile spinoff that was supposed to reward founders never came. |
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|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Moirai 📖 2013 - 2017 you walk down into a cave and meet somebody holding a bloody knife. you ask them what they have done, they type an answer, and you decide whether to kill them. the answer you read was written by a real person who played before you, and the answers you give get handed to whoever plays next, along wit |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Steam Greenlight 📖 2012 - 2017 steam greenlight opened on 30 august 2012 and handed the question of what got sold on steam to steam's own customers, who voted on submitted games until valve pulled the top of the list through. a hundred dollar submission fee arrived in the first week, right after the joke listings did, and the mon |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Playfire 📖 2007 - 2017 playfire was a social network for serious gamers, built in london in 2007. it plugged into xbox live and steam and pulled in your achievements and playtime automatically, so your profile was a running record of what you had actually played. it grew past a million users tracking tens of thousands of |
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|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Minions Paradise 📖 2015 - 2017 phil the minion sinks the cruise ship in the first thirty seconds and everybody washes up on an empty island. that was the premise, and turning the island into a resort was the game. ea shipped it three months after the minions film made a billion dollars and switched the servers off nineteen months |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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PKR.com 📖 2006 - 2017 pkr was online poker rendered as a room you sat in. your avatar had a face and a wardrobe, and the camera could swing around the table while you folded. jez san, who built the super fx chip for star fox, launched it in june 2006 and it reached five million registered accounts. the 3d cost more to bu |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Whirled 📖 2007 - 2017 whirled was a flash virtual world where almost nothing was made by the developer. players uploaded the avatars and built the rooms, then listed the results in a shop and kept most of what each sale brought in. that is roblox's arrangement, running inside a browser plugin eight years earlier and at a |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Mad Catz Interactive 📖 1989 - 2017 a plastic guitar finished it. for almost thirty years mad catz sold the second controller, the one that came out of the drawer when somebody else wanted to play, and it made a real business out of being the cheaper option nobody was loyal to. then in 2015 it took on the worldwide distribution of roc |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Club Penguin 📖 2005 - 2017 the virtual world for kids where you were a small flat penguin in a snowy multiplayer town. you waddled around. you played mini-games. you decorated your igloo. disney bought it in 2007 for 700 million. they shut it down in march 2017 for a mobile sequel called club penguin island that nobody liked. |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Curse Voice 📖 2014 - 2017 curse voice opened its beta in may 2014 and had a million users inside seven days, because it did something ventrilo and teamspeak had never tried. it read league of legends while you were playing and drew timers on top of the game. that was the feature everybody came for and it was also the reason |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Landmark 📖 2014 - 2017 landmark was sony online entertainment's voxel building sandbox, first pitched in august 2013 as everquest next landmark, an in-engine content creation tool for the promised everquest next mmo. the alpha opened on 31 january 2014, the beta name changed to just landmark in march 2014, and everquest n |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Asheron's Call 📖 1999 - 2017 asheron's call was the third pillar of the founding mmo era, released november 2, 1999 by turbine entertainment under microsoft publishing, ten months after everquest and two years after ultima online. it ran a single seamless world with no zoning across one continuous map called dereth. peak accoun |
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|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Wii U 📖 2012 - 2017 nintendo shipped a console with a screen built into the controller. the marketing made it sound like an accessory and the buying public agreed. 13.56 million units moved across four years, against switch's 130 million in less time. wii u is the nintendo console that nintendo themselves treat as a le |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Asheron's Call 2 📖 2002 - 2017 asheron's call 2 was the sequel that died, came back, and then died again. turbine launched it in november 2002 as the followup to the original asheron's call. by december 2005 it had bled too many subscribers to keep the lights on. seven years later turbine restored it for the remaining loyalists a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Guerrilla Cambridge 📖 1997 - 2017 in cambridge, england, one sony studio worked for nineteen years under four names. it began on 15 july 1997 as the bought-out games division of cyberlife technology, with an unfinished game called medievil in the deal. the last name, guerrilla cambridge, came in 2012 together with a killzone to buil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Marvel Super Hero Squad Online 📖 2011 - 2017 the friendly chibi wing of the marvel license. a browser mmo for kids in the exact window when browser mmos for kids were losing the whole audience to phones. lived on the same contract that took marvel heroes down the same year. gazillion the studio dissolved less than a year later. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
GameStick 📖 2013 - 2017 a games console the size of a usb stick, with a bluetooth controller that the console slid into for storage, funded by 5,600 people on kickstarter in early 2013. it shipped that november at $79 running android 4.1, sold badly against the ouya and against the phones everybody already had, and closed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Planet Poker 📖 1998 - 2017 on 1 january 1998 a three-six hold'em game went live and took a five percent rake, and that is the first hand of real-money online poker anyone can point to. planet poker was run by a retired canadian navy engineer on licensed software, it was overtaken by paradise poker inside two years, and in sep |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Devil's Third 📖 2015 - 2016 devil's third spent seven years passing between publishers before nintendo put it out on the wii u in 2015, where the reviews took it apart. the campaign was the part critics hated and the multiplayer was the part its defenders liked, which made the ending unusually cruel. nintendo switched the serv |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Absolute Games 📖 1998 - 2016 two people bought the domain ag.ru in the spring of 1998 and put the first review up on 8 may. for the next thirteen years absolute games was where russian-speaking pc players went to find out whether a game was worth the money, written by people who signed with handles instead of names. rambler bou |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Infestation: Survivor Stories 📖 2012 - 2016 hammerpoint interactive put the war z on steam on 17 december 2012 and valve removed it two days later, because the store page described a game nobody had built yet. it came back in february 2013, changed its name in june to stay clear of paramount's lawyers, and went on selling. by january 2015 it |
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|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Kemono Friends (mobile game) 📖 2015 - 2016 on 14 december 2016 nexon turned off a japanese mobile game that had not worked out. on 11 january 2017 the anime adaptation of that same game went to air and became the most talked about thing in japan for a season, with a cast of characters most of its new audience had never had the chance to meet |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Ghost Recon Phantoms 📖 2014 - 2016 a free-to-play cover shooter that ubisoft carved out of ghost recon online and rebranded in march 2014. the tactical shooter niche was already crowded by the time it went wide, and the game bled players for two years before ubisoft pulled the plug at the end of 2016. |
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|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Army Attack 📖 2011 - 2016 digital chocolate closed in april 2014 and army attack kept running for another two and a half years without it. the game came out of the company's helsinki studio in may 2011, put you against an enemy called the crimson empire, and was good enough at the player-versus-player half to reach the top f |
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| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
NovaLogic 📖 1985 - 2016 a medical-imaging engineer named kyle freeman worked out how to draw an entire outdoor landscape out of voxels on a 486, and a small calabasas company turned that into comanche in 1992 and delta force in 1998. novaworld, its matchmaking service, was free from 1997 and put more players in one session |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Might & Magic: Duel of Champions 📖 2012 - 2016 996 cards across six factions, every deck led by a hero card. ubisoft quebec opened duel of champions to the public on 13 september 2012 as a free-to-play card game in the might and magic world. development moved to chengdu in may 2015 and updates stopped that october. ubisoft closed the servers on |
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|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Tom Clancy's EndWar Online 📖 2015 - 2016 ubisoft shanghai spent roughly three years rebuilding a game that had flopped on consoles in 2008, and the rebuild lasted eleven months. the original tom clancy's endwar sold badly despite a voice command system that worked, so the return moved the idea into a browser and made it free, keeping the p |
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|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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ngmoco 📖 2008 - 2016 neil young left electronic arts in 2008 and started ngmoco on the bet that the iphone was a games machine rather than a phone with games on it. rolando showed you could sell a handheld title for ten dollars, and then eliminate and we rule showed you could make considerably more by charging nothing a |
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|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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United Front Games 📖 2007 - 2016 united front was a vancouver studio assembled in 2007 out of people who had just come off ea black box and rockstar vancouver. it made modnation racers for sony, then picked up a game activision had already cancelled and shipped it in 2012 as sleeping dogs, which is close to the hardest thing a stud |
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|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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LEGO Minifigures Online 📖 2015 - 2016 lego minifigures online was funcom's second try at a lego-branded mmo, announced in august 2013 as free-to-play and shipped on 29 june 2015 as a paid buy-once title. the game was isometric, the party was up to three minifigures with quick-swap, the worlds were themed hubs with dungeons attached. it |
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|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Marvel: Avengers Alliance 📖 2012 - 2016 the disney/playdom facebook game where you played a s.h.i.e.l.d. agent recruiting a roster of 166 marvel heroes into turn-based squad battles. launched 1 march 2012 as a promotional tie-in for the avengers movie, peaked around 2.6 million monthly users, expanded to a mobile sequel, then disney annou |
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|2016-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Sudden Attack 2 📖 2016 - 2016 sudden attack 2 launched in korea on 6 july 2016 as the sequel to the shooter that had owned korean pc bangs for a decade. twenty three days later nexon announced it was closing. the developer had ended its publishing contract and the launch had already gone badly on performance and on player reacti |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Digital Homicide Studios 📖 2014 - 2016 two brothers in yuma, arizona put around sixty games on steam in two years, most of them assembled out of bought unity asset packs. when people said so, digital homicide sued them: ten million dollars off the critic james stephanie sterling in march 2016, then eighteen million off a hundred anonymou |
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|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Desura 📖 2010 - 2016 desura opened in december 2010 as an indie-first steam alternative from the moddb team. linden lab bought it in july 2013 and offloaded it to bad juju games sixteen months later. bad juju filed for bankruptcy in june 2015. the store limped through receivership until september 2016, when it finally s |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Apple Game Center 📖 2010 - 2016 game center was apple's xbox live for the iphone. it launched with iOS 4.1, picked up sixty seven million accounts in its first year, then slowly emptied out as every game built its own social layer and apple stopped promoting the hub. iOS 10 removed the icon and moved the whole thing into the setti |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Legends of Norrath 📖 2007 - 2016 legends of norrath was a digital collectible card game sony online entertainment built into everquest and everquest ii, playable from inside either game or on a standalone client. it launched on 5 september 2007 and ran through sixteen card sets before new ones stopped arriving in august 2013. daybr |
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|2016-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Pokémon Uranium 📖 2016 - 2016 nine years of work by two people writing under handles, released on 6 august 2016 and pulled on the 13th. in between it was downloaded a million and a half times, which is the part that got noticed. the game invented 150 species and a nuclear elemental type for a series whose owner has never once li |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Microsoft Project Spark 📖 2013 - 2016 microsoft wanted xbox one to be a creator platform, not just a console, and project spark was the most literal version of that pitch. you got a starter kit with sample worlds and hours of tutorial video on top. it transitioned to free in late 2015 and the servers went off in august 2016. the linkin |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Project Spark 📖 2014 - 2016 less than three years after microsoft put it on a stage at e3, project spark was pulled from the stores. it was a game about making games, free by the end, with a creation toolset good enough that players rebuilt whole platformers inside it. the part nobody could rebuild was the sharing layer, which |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Sonic Runners 📖 2015 - 2016 sonic runners was sonic team's free-to-play endless runner for phones, soft launched in japan and canada in february 2015 and released worldwide that june. it passed five million downloads and still counted as a failure inside sega, pulling something like thirty million yen a month against the five |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Spicy Horse 📖 2007 - 2016 american mcgee moved to shanghai in 2007 and spent nine years proving a western studio could be run in china for a western audience. alice: madness returns came out of that building in 2011 with eighty five people on it. by july 2016 there were six left, the ozombie kickstarter had been cancelled th |
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|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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PlanetSide 📖 2003 - 2016 planetside tried to be an mmo and an fps at once. the math worked when servers were full of subscribers. when the subscribers thinned, three-faction warfare turned into two empty bases and one farming queue. sony kept it on life support through the 2014 free-to-play conversion, then turned the light |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mafia Wars 📖 2008 - 2016 mafia wars was the zynga title that lived on neighbor invites. text-mode gangster freemium gameplay where you ran jobs, recruited mafia members from your facebook friend list, fought rival mobs, and bought premium loot with reward points. it shipped 2008 on facebook and rolled out to myspace, yahoo, |
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|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Nosgoth 📖 2015 - 2016 nosgoth started life as the multiplayer half of legacy of kain: dead sun, a single player game climax studios worked on for three years before square enix cancelled it in 2012. psyonix took the leftover multiplayer piece and shipped it on its own: four humans with crossbows against four vampires wit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Darkfall 📖 2009 - 2016 darkfall was a greek-built mmo for people who wanted ultima online before it went soft: one world, no levels, manual aiming, and full loot on every death. aventurine spent most of a decade making it, launched in february 2009, then closed it in november 2012 to replace it with unholy wars. the repla |
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|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Dust 514 📖 2013 - 2016 dust 514 was a free to play playstation 3 shooter wired into eve online's live universe, built by ccp shanghai and released on 14 may 2013. players on the ground fought over planets that pilots in orbit could bombard, and the results fed back into eve's own war. it never held a console audience larg |
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|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE 📖 2007 - 2016 shin megami tensei imagine was the mmo entry in the megami tensei franchise. cave and later gungho developed it under a license from atlus. you played a demon buster inside a post-apocalyptic tokyo, running demon recruitment and fusion mechanics from the mainline games in a real-time party mmo shape |
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|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Disney Infinity 📖 2013 - 2016 three years of avalanche software trying to be skylanders for disney's ip vault. you bought a plastic figurine, dropped it on an infinity base usb dongle, and the character appeared in the game. when the toys-to-life category cooled in 2016 disney closed avalanche, retired the franchise, and got out |
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| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Disney Interactive Studios 📖 1988 - 2016 disney spent twenty-eight years trying to be a real games publisher. they were buena vista games, then disney interactive, then disney interactive studios. they bought avalanche software and junction point studios, shipped epic mickey on the wii in 2010, then bet the entire console business on the d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
CastleVille 📖 2011 - 2016 castleville was zynga's medieval-fantasy entry in the social-game wave, built at the zynga dallas studio, with art that aimed at a deeper online game feel and a soundtrack recorded by an actual orchestra and choir. it launched november 2011 on facebook flash, reached five million daily active users |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Games 📖 1998 - 2016 the yahoo browser games portal. pool, chess, spades, hearts, dominoes, backgammon. each game opened in a small popup window. you got matched with random strangers. peak in early 2000s. yahoo retired the whole game suite in stages between 2014 and 2016. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Lionhead Studios 📖 1997 - 2016 lionhead was peter molyneux's second uk studio after he left bullfrog and ea in 1997, set up in guildford with mark webley and tim rance. black and white in march 2001 was the debut, a god game that ran on a custom engine and shipped about two million copies. the fable series followed from 2004 onwa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Empire of Sports 📖 2007 - 2016 a french studio called f4 built a persistent world where one avatar trained across six sports and met strangers from other countries in real time. empire of sports was demoed at leipzig in august 2007 and ran an officially licensed virtual roland-garros in may 2009, in the same weeks as the real tou |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Nostalrius 📖 2015 - 2016 nostalrius was a free server that ran world of warcraft as it stood in 2006, patch 1.12, with none of the expansions on top of it. an unpaid french team opened it on 28 february 2015 and it took more than 800,000 registered accounts, around 150,000 of them still logging in a year later. blizzard's a |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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GameMaker Sandbox 📖 2007 - 2016 yoyo games spent nine years letting anyone with a copy of gamemaker upload what they had built, and ended up holding more than a hundred thousand games, most of them somebody's first. the sandbox was removed on 8 april 2016 to make room for gamemaker: player, a steam-shaped storefront that was annou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Scarlet Blade 📖 2013 - 2016 scarlet blade was the western version of a korean mmo called queen's blade, localized by aeria games in 2013. it ran on the aggressive marketing angle that its characters wore very little armor. the game lived three years and died quietly when aeria decided the servers were not paying for themselves |
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|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Rise of Mana 📖 2014 - 2016 the eleventh mana game was free-to-play, japanese only, and lasted two years. square enix put rise of mana on ios in march 2014 with a story about an angel and a demon forced to share one body, added android later that year and a playstation vita port in may 2015. it passed two million active player |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Broadband Navigator 📖 2002 - 2016 japan got a hard disk for the playstation 2 and a dashboard to run it, and nobody else did. broadband navigator turned the console into a media machine with a linux web browser and a cd ripper on board, plus channels run by capcom and konami. the install disc refused to boot on any console sold outs |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
DarkScape 📖 2015 - 2016 darkscape was jagex's attempt to spin off a runescape variant where anyone could attack anyone almost anywhere. it opened on 16 september 2015 and closed on 28 march 2016. the shutdown notice cited lack of interest in plain language. it lasted about six months. |
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|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Evolution Studios 📖 1999 - 2016 evolution studios spent seventeen years making racing games that looked better than they had any business looking, first the official world rally championship series on ps2 and then motorstorm on ps3. sony bought the studio outright in 2007. driveclub was meant to be a ps4 launch title, arrived a ye |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Candystand 📖 1997 - 2016 candystand was a free browser games portal built in 1997 for the life savers candy brand by skyworks technologies, a studio run by two ex-activision game makers. it was the first big advergame site on the web, over a hundred flash and shockwave games wrapped in candy branding so the fun and the prod |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Darkspore 📖 2011 - 2016 darkspore was maxis emeryville's first game after will wright left, a squad based action rpg that borrowed the spore creature editor and demanded a live connection before it would run anything, single player included. it shipped on 26 april 2011 to mixed reviews and settled at 65 on metacritic. elec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tales of Pirates 📖 2007 - 2016 in the last week of january 2016 igg posted a farewell and pointed everyone at its mobile games. a month later, on the leap day, the servers went off. what died that february was technically the sequel: the original ships had been migrated into tales of pirates 2 back in 2011 and the old client stop |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Rusty Hearts 📖 2011 - 2016 japan went first, in march 2014. then north america that september, then china the following january, and finally the korean original in february 2016, almost five years after it opened. stairway games built a cel-shaded beat-em-up about a half-vampire with a sword and licensed it to a different pub |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Asphalt Overdrive 📖 2014 - 2016 gameloft had a racing series that worked, and in september 2014 it shipped a spin-off that did not race. asphalt overdrive was an endless runner built for one thumb, set in a neon 1980s southern california assembled out of the parent series' art. reviewers landed it at 59 on metacritic and the compl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Vostu 📖 2007 - 2016 zynga sued vostu in june 2011 for copying its games down to the bugs, and took a settlement in december that cost money and forced four titles to be redrawn. vostu was the biggest social games company in latin america when that happened, started by three harvard classmates in 2007 and living almost |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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MAIET Entertainment 📖 1998 - 2015 maiet was a seoul studio of five people that grew into the maker of gunz: the duel, a third person shooter whose players found animation cancels in the movement code and turned them into a discipline called k-style. the sequel removed the accident on purpose and the audience did not follow. the comp |
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|2015-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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The Witcher Battle Arena 📖 2015 - 2015 eleven months is how long cd projekt red stayed in the mobile moba business. the witcher battle arena shipped on android and ios on 22 january 2015 with eight heroes from the series and a metacritic average of 63. four months later the same studio released the witcher 3 and became one of the most fa |
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|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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onGamers 📖 2013 - 2015 cbs interactive hired an esports team in 2013 and put onGamers into beta that november, betting that professional gaming was ready for a properly funded newsroom. more than half its traffic came from reddit. on 3 july 2014 reddit banned the domain for vote manipulation, the site's senior editor was |
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|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Soulcalibur: Lost Swords 📖 2014 - 2015 bandai namco put a soulcalibur on the playstation 3 for free in 2014 and took the other player out of it. every fight was against the computer, and you could pay to lift the limits on how long you were allowed to keep playing. the producer said plainly that the paid upgrades were the reason a versus |
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|1983-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Mastertronic 📖 1983 - 2015 mastertronic worked out in 1983 that a game did not have to be sold in a computer shop, and put cassettes at a pound ninety nine on the same racks as the sweets and the magazines. it sold in volumes the full price houses could not match. by 1987 its real business was distributing sega hardware in br |
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|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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GameTap 📖 2005 - 2015 gametap was the turner broadcasting subscription that streamed classic atari titles and arcade ports to broadband households in north america. blake lewin and ricardo sanchez launched it on october 17 2005 out of atlanta with the adult swim adjacency baked into the brand. the launch catalog had over |
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|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Face of Mankind 📖 2006 - 2015 face of mankind was a science-fiction mmo that cared more about roleplay and player politics than about combat. a german studio, duplex systems, built it, and it went live in 2006 as a persistent world run almost entirely by its own factions, where players held offices and policed each other. it was |
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|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Infinite Crisis 📖 2013 - 2015 one hundred and forty one days separated the launch of infinite crisis from the day its servers went dark. turbine, the studio behind asheron's call and the lord of the rings online, spent years building a five-on-five arena game out of the dc multiverse, with gaslight batman and nightmare superman |
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|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Indiagames 📖 1999 - 2015 five people in mumbai in 1999, around 300 by 2009 with offices on three continents. vishal gondal's indiagames made the first spider-man game for mobile phones and sold java games through carriers from verizon to airtel. a chinese portal owned most of it by 2005 and utv took a majority in 2007, whic |
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|1997-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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TeleFragged 📖 1997 - 2015 telefragged was where the first generation of quake fan sites lived. it opened in 1997 as a hosting network with a daily news page and a hit counter that called its visitors victims, and it carried doomworld and beyondunreal for the next eighteen years. the downloads split off into 3ddownloads and l |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Mobile 📖 2012 - 2015 playstation mobile was sony's attempt to put a playstation-branded storefront onto android phones and the ps vita at the same time. it launched on october 3 2012, after being announced in 2011 as playstation suite. about 56 publishers signed up to ship 683 games for it. the storefront stopped accept |
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|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Need for Speed World 📖 2010 - 2015 need for speed world took the maps out of most wanted and carbon, put every player on them at the same time, and sold the shortcut. it went fully free six weeks after launch and passed twenty million registered accounts by late 2012. ea closed it on 14 july 2015 alongside three other free-to-play ti |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Battlefield Play4Free 📖 2011 - 2015 battlefield play4free opened as an open beta on 4 april 2011 and never left that label. easy studios in stockholm built it on the battlefield 2 engine and filled it with battlefield 2 maps, then sold the weapons back to you one at a time, by the day if you were paying in credits and forever if you w |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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FIFA World 📖 2013 - 2015 fifa world was ea testing whether ultimate team could stand on its own without a sixty dollar game underneath it. free to play, pc only, aimed at markets where the console install base was thin and the average machine was old. it opened in brazil and russia in november 2013 and went global the follo |
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|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Battlefield Heroes 📖 2009 - 2015 stockholm built a battlefield game that looked like a saturday cartoon and started from a web page, which in 2009 was a genuinely strange thing to attempt with a shooter. it worked: seven million registered accounts by march 2011 and ten million by january 2012, most of them on machines that could n |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Destiny of Spirits 📖 2014 - 2015 on 25 march 2015, one year and five days after the japanese launch, sony gave the servers a closing date. destiny of spirits was a free vita game that decided which spirits you could summon by where you were standing, and it needed a connection for every part of that. it went off on 30 june 2015 and |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Killfrog 📖 1999 - 2015 in 1999 kevin swearingen started it out of a basement in denver, on a power mac that was already out of date, and named it after his email address. the cartoons came with a parents strongly cautioned warning: three evil piggies tormenting a little girl named susie, and a cat that kept losing to hous |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
FrontierVille 📖 2010 - 2015 frontierville was the second huge zynga hit after farmville. it launched june 9, 2010 with american-frontier theming, lead designer brian reynolds at the zynga east baltimore studio, and an explicit goal of doing what farmville did but with a stronger storyline. it hit twenty million monthly active |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
OnLive 📖 2010 - 2015 onlive was the right idea five years too early. the network it needed did not exist outside a handful of us metros, and even there the latency was a coin flip. sony bought the patents in 2015 and shut the service down a month later. |
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|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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CityVille 📖 2010 - 2015 cityville was zynga at its absolute peak. launched on facebook december 2 2010, it grew faster than any app the platform had hosted to that point. by january 2 2011 it had crossed 100 million monthly active users and held the record for largest facebook application. the gameplay loop borrowed from f |
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|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
2K Australia 📖 2000 - 2015 take-two closed its canberra studio on 16 april 2015 and 58 people lost their jobs the same day. it had opened in 2000 as irrational games australia under jonathan chey and spent most of fifteen years as the second pair of hands on somebody else's game, before finally leading one of its own with bor |
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|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Amazing Alex 📖 2012 - 2015 rovio spent 2012 trying to show it was a studio rather than a single hit, and amazing alex was the attempt. it reviewed decently, sold reasonably, and never came close to the thing it was following. on 13 april 2015 rovio took it off the app store and google play on the same day, and the company's n |
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|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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PlayStation Home 📖 2008 - 2015 playstation home was sony's answer to second life, except attached to a console you already owned and a network you were already logged into. open beta opened on 11 december 2008. by closure on 31 march 2015 it had 41 million registered accounts, four regional shards, more than forty game-developer |
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|1987-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Maxis (Emeryville) 📖 1987 - 2015 maxis was founded by will wright and jeff braun in 1987, shipped simcity, simcity 2000, the sims, and spore, and ran as the core ea simulation studio out of the bay area until march 4 2015 when ea closed the emeryville office. ea kept the maxis label for the sims work in other studios. the original |
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|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Sony Online Entertainment 📖 1998 - 2015 sony online entertainment was the san diego studio that built the everquest franchise and ran the playstation side of sony's pc mmo business from 1998 through the early 2010s. it shipped everquest in 1999, then planetside in 2003, then star wars galaxies, then dc universe online, then free realms. s |
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|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Dawngate 📖 2013 - 2015 electronic arts put a new studio called waystone games on a moba in 2013, at the point when every publisher on earth wanted one. dawngate did not copy league of legends, it argued with it: spirit wells that paid you for holding ground in the jungle, and loadouts that let the same character be built |
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|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Transformers Universe 📖 2014 - 2015 transformers universe never launched. jagex announced it in 2010 as a browser mmo where you would build your own transformer. four years later it came back as a moba, because robots turned out to be hard to customize. open beta opened on 4 july 2014 and founder packs sold for up to $449.99. on 16 de |
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|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Roiworld 📖 2003 - 2015 roiworld was a south korean casual gaming platform founded in 2003, running high-quality vector flash dress-up games inside a community site with competitions and outfit-drawing tools. the audience was mostly tween and early-teen girls, at peak the site drew on the order of twenty million registered |
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|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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GotFrag 📖 2002 - 2015 the counter-strike news site, started in 2002, back when competitive gaming had no press of its own and no name anyone agreed on. it ran match reports and demos, sold a paid tier called gotfrag prime, and from december 2004 kept gamesense, the first statistical database of professional players. majo |
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|1981-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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General Computer Corporation 📖 1981 - 2015 fifty thousand dollars a month for two years is what atari agreed to pay the students it had just sued, on condition they stopped modifying other companies' arcade games without asking. general computer had one more kit already finished when that deal was signed: a pac-man modification called crazy |
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|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Neopets 📖 1999 - 2014 dormant the virtual pet site. you adopted a neopet (faerie kacheek, christmas shoyru, stealthy gelert), fed it, played with it, dressed it up. the site had hundreds of mini-games, a stock market, an auction house, a real economy. peak around 2005. viacom bought it the same year for 160 million. flash dying |
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|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Sodaplay (SodaConstructor) 📖 2000 - 2014 the flash physics toy where you built walking creatures from springs and masses. drag a node, attach a spring, set the muscle frequency, watch the thing limp across the screen. by sodacreative in london. ran from 2000 until flash died. |
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|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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AllGame 📖 1998 - 2014 allgame started in february 1998 as the all game guide, the video game arm of the all media guide project that also produced allmusic and allmovie. it went after a complete catalog of everything released in the united states, from arcade cabinets to home consoles, with a staff-written review and a c |
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|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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UltimatePoker.com 📖 2013 - 2014 nevada legalized real-money online poker inside its own borders and ultimate gaming, owned through station casinos by the fertitta family, got the first license running. the first legal regulated hand in the united states was dealt at nine in the morning on 30 april 2013, to players whose devices ha |
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|1996-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Wireplay 📖 1996 - 2014 for about four years british telecom was in the video game business. wireplay opened to the public in june 1996, timed to euro 96, and let you dial a bt number instead of the internet to play doom or warcraft ii against somebody else in the country. at its peak it carried over 100,000 registered pla |
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| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Westone Bit Entertainment 📖 1986 - 2014 ryuichi nishizawa and michishito ishizuka left sega in 1986 and called their company escape, then changed it because escape made them sound like people who would not finish a job. the wonder boy games are theirs. sega held the title, hudson soft licensed the game underneath it and turned it into adv |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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ShiftyLook 📖 2012 - 2014 a webcomic studio inside bandai namco, opened to find out whether anything was left in the arcade cabinets nobody had touched since the eighties. it hired working comics professionals and put out around twenty strips on properties like dig dug and wonder momo, plus three animated series and a browse |
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|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Monkey Quest 📖 2011 - 2014 monkey quest was nickelodeon's attempt at owning a kids world of its own instead of licensing one from a cartoon. it ran in a browser from march 2011, sold memberships and a currency called nick cash, and put a generation of children into a side-scrolling fantasy country called ook. nickelodeon anno |
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|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar 📖 2013 - 2014 ultima forever was a free-to-play action rpg for ios that took the frame of ultima iv, the game about the eight virtues, and hung a chest-and-key economy off it. mythic entertainment built it with escalation studios and electronic arts shipped it on 7 august 2013. reviews were bad in a specific way, |
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|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes 📖 2007 - 2014 vanguard launched in january 2007 from a team that had just built everquest. it shipped in a state that could not survive the wow era it was supposed to compete with. sony online entertainment bought the failing studio four months later, kept patching the game for five years, flipped it to free-to-p |
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|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Wizardry Online 📖 2013 - 2014 a japanese-developed western revival of the classic sir-tech wizardry dungeon crawl, ported by gamepot and published by SOE in january 2013. the pitch was permadeath: die and roll for a resurrection, fail the roll and lose the character forever. eighteen months later SOE killed the western servers i |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Café World 📖 2009 - 2014 café world launched on facebook 30 september 2009 and pulled 8 million players inside the first week. zynga ran it as its third-biggest title after farmville and cityville, over 10 million daily active users at peak. the announcement came 23 may 2014, the shutdown 22 july 2014, paired with coastervi |
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|1994-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Neversoft 📖 1994 - 2014 founded on 10 july 1994 and made defunct on 10 july 2014, twenty years to the day. in between, a skateboarding license nobody else especially wanted became tony hawk's pro skater, and later, when activision needed guitar hero shipped every single year, neversoft was the studio that shipped it. the m |
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|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Games for Windows Live 📖 2007 - 2014 microsoft's idea of bringing xbox live to pc games. it forced you to make a microsoft account just to save your single player game. it never worked properly. nobody asked for it. people are still angry about it. |
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|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Age of Empires Online 📖 2011 - 2014 microsoft tried to take age of empires from a boxed rts to a free-to-play live-service mmo. the game shipped august 2011 with seven civilizations, an mmo progression layer on top of classic aoe combat, and microtransactions stacked on games for windows live. new content stopped in january 2013. serv |
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|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Airtight Games 📖 2004 - 2014 four people put in six thousand dollars each in the autumn of 2004, and that twenty-four thousand dollars was the entire starting capital of a console studio in redmond. a physics contract kept the lights on, then capcom signed dark void, and for a few years airtight was a sixty-person shop building |
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|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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PALGN 📖 2003 - 2014 three hundred thousand people a month read an australian games site that existed because ign put its message boards behind a paywall in 2003 and the pal regulars left. eleven years later the editorial crew walked out and there was nobody to file copy, so the site simply stopped. the domain then went |
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|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age 📖 2013 - 2014 kabam launched the hobbit: armies of the third age on 21 march 2013 as a free-to-play browser strategy game tied to peter jackson's second hobbit film. it ran on facebook and on kabam's own web portal. warner bros. interactive was on the licensing side. by june 2014 the audience had not built and ka |
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|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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GameSpy 📖 1999 - 2014 gamespy started in 1999 from an earlier quake server browser called qspy. it became the matchmaking middleware behind more than 800 game titles. you would launch a multiplayer pc game in the 2000s and your server list was almost certainly fetched through gamespy. the editorial side (planet network, |
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|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Mythic Entertainment 📖 1995 - 2014 mythic entertainment was the fairfax virginia studio that mark jacobs and rob denton built around mid-1990s text muds before pivoting to graphical mmos with dark age of camelot in october 2001. ea bought the company in june 2006 for around $200 million. inside ea the studio got ultima online to main |
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| RIP |
|1974-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Jaleco 📖 1974 - 2014 jaleco started in 1974 as japan leisure company, building the machines that filled arcades rather than the games that ran on them. the name people remember comes from the eighties, from city connection in 1985 and the long shelf of famicom cartridges after it. from 2000 onward it was passed between |
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|1992-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Silicon Knights 📖 1992 - 2014 silicon knights spent twenty two years in st. catharines, ontario, and made one game that people still talk about. eternal darkness in 2002 pretended to break your television in order to frighten you, and nintendo took out a patent on the idea. then the studio sued epic games over the unreal engine, |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lord of Ultima 📖 2010 - 2014 lord of ultima was a free browser strategy game that ea phenomic built in germany and released in april 2010, carrying a name from richard garriott's series and almost nothing else from it. you laid out a city on a grid, waited for timers to finish, and paid real money to wait less. ea closed the st |
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|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Impulse 📖 2008 - 2014 impulse was stardock's attempt to sell pc games without treating the buyer as a suspect. it launched in 2008 against a steam that had already won the argument, got sold to gamestop in 2011, and was renamed and left alone until it stopped. the client and the store went dark on 24 april 2014. the purc |
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|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Digital Chocolate 📖 2003 - 2014 trip hawkins founded electronic arts, then 3do, then in october 2003 a company for games on phones that had no touchscreen and no store to download from. digital chocolate shipped through carrier decks, was named best mobile developer two years running, and made tower bloxx for people playing with a |
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|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Free Realms 📖 2009 - 2014 free realms was sony online entertainment's bid to build the disney-tier kid mmo on the playstation 3 and the pc at the same time. it shipped on april 28, 2009 from san diego and hit twenty million registered users by 2011. the servers went dark on march 31, 2014 at six pacific. john smedley said in |
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|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Mochi Media 📖 2005 - 2014 mochi media was the san francisco flash-game distribution and ad-serving network founded in 2005 by bob ippolito and jameson hsu. it claimed about 140 million monthly active users at peak. shanda games bought the company for 80 million dollars in january 2010. the network shut on 31 march 2014 after |
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|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures 📖 2010 - 2014 a browser-based virtual world for kids who watched the animated clone wars show on cartoon network. sony online entertainment ran it as a licensed free-to-play tie-in from september 2010. the license paid a share of every microtransaction. when SOE cut costs in january 2014 the game went in the same |
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|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Heroes of Might and Magic Online 📖 2008 - 2014 tq digital built a chinese mmo out of heroes iii and netdragon published it, three years later than announced, opening on 30 may 2008. it stacked three games into one client, a live world you walked around on top and heroes iii combat underneath. an english version existed from 2010 but the ubisoft |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Magic: The Gathering - Tactics 📖 2011 - 2014 sony online entertainment held a wizards of the coast license and built something out of it that almost nobody had asked for: magic played as a grid tactics game, with planeswalkers and creatures as figures you walked around a map, no lands in the deck and a mana pool that simply went up by one each |
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|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Call of Duty: Elite 📖 2011 - 2014 two million people were paying activision fifty dollars a year to look at their own kill statistics. elite launched on 8 november 2011 next to modern warfare 3 and fell over on the first night, with everyone who had not paid locked out of it until 1 december. the premium tier was scrapped a year lat |
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|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Irrational Games 📖 1997 - 2014 irrational was founded in december 1997 by ken levine and two other ex-looking-glass devs in quincy, massachusetts. system shock 2 in 1999 was the debut, co-developed with looking glass right before that studio collapsed. bioshock in august 2007 was the studio's biggest moment, three million units, |
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|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Flappy Bird 📖 2013 - 2014 flappy bird was a free mobile game by a vietnamese developer named dong nguyen. it was released in may 2013, became a global obsession in january 2014, and was pulled by its own creator on february 10, 2014 while earning around fifty thousand dollars a day from in-game ads. nguyen said the game had |
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|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
World Cyber Games 📖 2000 - 2014 wcg was the samsung-backed korean attempt to build an olympics for video games. it ran annually from 2000 to 2013 across counter-strike and warcraft iii and starcraft and fifa, awarded medals to national teams, held opening ceremonies with flag parades. the format peaked around 2008 in cologne with |
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|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Tap Tap Revenge 📖 2008 - 2014 nate true wrote it for a jailbroken iphone in september 2007, before apple had shipped a way for anyone to write anything. it was bought and renamed, and it shipped in the app store on the day the store opened. it took a million downloads in twenty days out of an installed base of five or six millio |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MAG 📖 2010 - 2014 two hundred and fifty six players in a single battle, on a playstation 3, in january 2010. zipper interactive built mag as a persistent territorial war between three private military companies, and stacked players into squads of eight that rolled up into platoons and companies so somebody above you |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation 📖 2008 - 2014 the box came with a bluetooth headset, because the entire game was voice and the entire game was online. confrontation had no campaign, only sixteen-player squad matches on maps that ps2 socom veterans already knew by heart, and at launch it was missing features printed on its own packaging. slant s |
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|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mythos 📖 2007 - 2014 mythos was a free-to-play diablo clone built by flagship studios as a side project alongside the doomed hellgate: london. when flagship collapsed in july 2008, mythos went into hiatus with the rest of the studio. the korean publisher hanbitsoft bought the ip and ran a relaunched version on its own s |
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|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Trickster Online 📖 2003 - 2014 a 2d isometric korean mmo from 2003 where you played an animal and dug holes. the drill system gave it a second way to play that involved no fighting at all, which is why people stayed on it for a decade. licensing carried it across asia and then to north america in 2007. the american servers closed |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
ArchLord 📖 2005 - 2014 one player per server, for four weeks at a time, with a castle and the ability to change the weather over everyone else's heads. that was the whole pitch of archlord and it was a better idea than the game around it. nhn built it, codemasters sold it to the west in 2006 and gave up the license in 200 |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Chromaroma 📖 2010 - 2014 london's transport network was the board. chromaroma read the journey history off your registered oyster card and scored it, so that going to work became points and stations became territory worth holding. about ten thousand commuters ended up competing over a journey they were making anyway. mudlar |
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|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Goozex 📖 2006 - 2013 goozex never touched a single game it traded. it ran a queue, matched a person who wanted a title with a person who had it, and told one of them to put it in an envelope. the payment was an internal point balance worth five dollars per hundred, plus a ninety nine cent token per trade, which is how a |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning 📖 2008 - 2013 mythic spent five years building a realm-versus-realm engine for the warhammer fantasy license and shipped it into a market that had already converged on world of warcraft. it sold a million boxes, peaked near 800,000 subscribers, then collapsed to around 300,000 within months and never stopped slid |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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ClanBase 📖 1998 - 2013 clanbase started in october 1998 as a dutch ladder where quake ii clans arranged wars against each other, and it grew into the place european competitive pc gaming kept its records. at its size it held around 1.8 million players and 180,000 clans across more than fifty games, and its eurocup and nat |
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Terminal Reality 📖 1994 - 2013 the news came off a facebook post. in december 2013 a man who had worked at terminal reality for ten years wrote that the place seemed to have finally shut down, and the trade press ran it because nobody at the studio would say otherwise. the company website had already collapsed into a link to that |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Food Force 📖 2005 - 2013 the united nations shipped a video game. the world food programme paid for food force, released it free on 14 april 2005, and six million people downloaded it to fly a helicopter over a fictional famine and work out how to feed a person on thirty cents a day. konami localized it for japan that octob |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Online Pass 📖 2010 - 2013 ten dollars, printed on a slip of cardboard inside the game case, was the price of making a used disc worth less. buy the game new and the code came free with it. buy it second hand and the multiplayer half stayed locked until you paid electronic arts again for a disc electronic arts had already bee |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Full Screen Mario 📖 2013 - 2013 one month after boing boing linked to it, fullscreenmario.com was serving about three hundred thousand visits a day and josh goldberg was a junior at rensselaer who had rebuilt super mario bros in javascript for fun. nintendo's dmca notice arrived on the first of november 2013 and the site came down |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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BattleForge 📖 2009 - 2013 battleforge was an electronic arts real time strategy game where your army was a deck of cards you bought and traded on an in-game auction house, then played onto the map out of an energy pool. it shipped as a boxed retail product in march 2009 and went free to play sixty-three days later, which tel |
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|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Dragon Ball Online 📖 2010 - 2013 dragon ball online was a korean mmo set 216 years after the end of dragon ball z, with a timeline and a cast of new villains that akira toriyama designed himself. it launched in korea in february 2010 and reached taiwan and hong kong in 2011. it never shipped anywhere else, despite an announced japa |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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2K Marin 📖 2007 - 2013 take-two has still never said this studio closed. 2K announced it on 17 december 2007, built it in novato specifically to make bioshock 2 without ken levine, shipped that game in 2010 and the bureau: xcom declassified in 2013, then cut the majority of the staff on 17 october 2013 and moved the remai |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Shadow Cities 📖 2010 - 2013 grey area launched shadow cities in finland on 10 november 2010, an iphone game that drew a map of wherever you were standing and cut it into gateways for two factions to take off each other. it raised two and a half million dollars from index ventures in february 2011 and opened across europe and n |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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OMGPop 📖 2006 - 2013 a small new york flash game studio that hit escape velocity with draw something in early 2012. zynga paid one hundred and eighty million dollars for it in march 2012. by september 2013 the office was closed and the portal was dark. one of the shortest acquisition-to-shutdown arcs of the facebook-gam |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Pirates of the Caribbean Online 📖 2007 - 2013 the disney mmo built around the pirates of the caribbean films. it launched on halloween 2007 with character creation and ship combat, set in a caribbean modeled on the dead man's chest era. it ran for six years and got pulled offline on 19 september 2013 alongside toontown online and pixie hollow. |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Pixie Hollow 📖 2008 - 2013 the disney fairies mmo built as a tie-in to the tinker bell film franchise. you created a fairy with a talent type and dressed her in seasonal clothing, played minigames across the meadows of pixie hollow, decorated a small home tree of your own. it launched on 20 september 2008 alongside the first |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Toontown Online 📖 2003 - 2013 the disney mmo where you played a small cartoon dog or cat or rabbit fighting off business-suit robots called cogs. it launched in 2003. disney shut it down on 19 september 2013 along with pirates of the caribbean online and pixie hollow. fans built toontown rewritten less than a week after the serv |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Xbox Live Arcade 📖 2004 - 2013 a 50 MB size limit is what made it work. developers who could not fit a retail game into that had to make something else instead, and what they made was braid and castle crashers. every title shipped with a playable trial, so a small studio got the same shelf position as a publisher with a marketing |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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FusionFall 📖 2009 - 2013 for four and a half years cartoon network ran a real mmo with player housing and a subscription card you bought at target. the kids who played it were nine. they are now in their twenties and they are the only people still writing about it. fan revivals tried to bring the game back, then cartoon net |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Fleck 📖 2011 - 2013 oakland, california, where a studio best known for a mobile casino game built a massively multiplayer world on top of google maps. fleck let you garden on real plots and fight zombies near your own street, and the restaurants you could buy had to exist on yelp first. big fish games bought the studio |
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|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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0x10c 📖 2012 - 2013 markus persson announced it on 3 april 2012, four months after stepping back from minecraft, and the piece people actually built things with was a fictional processor called the dcpu-16. emulators and assemblers for that chip were running long before any playable build of the game existed. on 13 aug |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Ravenwood Fair 📖 2010 - 2013 john romero arrived at lolapps on 1 august 2010 and shipped ravenwood fair on facebook eleven weeks later. six months after that it had twenty five million players, eleven million of them on facebook alone, and it was running in nine languages on mixi and orkut as well. then lolapps was bought, the |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Everybody Votes Channel 📖 2007 - 2013 nintendo shipped a free channel in 2007 whose entire content was a question with two answers. you voted with your mii, and a few days later the console showed you the result as a crowd of little people leaning one way, broken down by region on a map of your country. its second trick was asking you t |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Check Mii Out Channel 📖 2007 - 2013 nintendo shipped a free wii channel whose entire purpose was showing off the little avatars people had made of themselves. you submitted a mii and it came back with a twelve digit number that strangers could search for. they rated it out of five stars, and the monthly rankings crowned somebody a mas |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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DotAlicious 📖 2010 - 2013 dota 2 had not left beta when it emptied the warcraft iii ladders, and dotalicious was one of them. it opened in april 2010 on rented german servers. players were matched by skill level, and leavers were sent to play among themselves. in january 2012 a game started there every thirty seconds. the ad |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Pet Society 📖 2008 - 2013 pet society was the playfish facebook game where you raised a cartoon pet, washed it in a bathtub, dressed it from a clothes shop and visited your friends' pets to leave gifts. it shipped in september 2008 and hit fifty million monthly players inside two years. ea bought playfish in november 2009 an |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Empires & Allies 📖 2011 - 2013 zynga's biggest launch ever, for about a month. empires and allies put a combat layer on top of the farmville formula, went out in twelve languages on 1 june 2011, and had thirty-three million people a month attacking each other's islands by the third week. it was the last big thing zynga did before |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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The Sims Social 📖 2011 - 2013 the sims social was ea's facebook adaptation of the sims franchise, built by playfish and released on 9 august 2011. it took sixty-five million registered players in its first ten months and briefly sat as the second most-popular game on facebook behind cityville. by the spring of 2013 the number ha |
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|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Playfish 📖 2007 - 2013 playfish was the london social-game studio kristian segerstrale and three co-founders started in october 2007, one month after facebook opened its platform to third-party apps. it hit fifty-five million monthly users at peak, ea bought it in november 2009 for four hundred million dollars, and by jun |
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|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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SimCity Social 📖 2012 - 2013 a licensed sequel that inherited a franchise name it could not carry. simcity social was a facebook city-builder built by playfish under the ea logo, killed inside the same 14 june 2013 batch that took the sims social and pet society. shutdown announcement 14 april 2013, effective two months later. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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The Adrenaline Vault 📖 1995 - 2013 an investment banker who thought the print game magazines had gone soft started a website in 1995 to run reviews nobody had paid for. by 2000 avault was pulling three to four million people a month and it was where you went for the demo. its founder left in 2011 to build professional esports instead |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Civilization World 📖 2011 - 2013 firaxis put civilization on facebook and removed the one thing that made civilization civilization, which was the turn. it ran in real time in a browser, with ranks going from noble up to king and fame points where a score used to be. public beta opened on 6 july 2011. 2k announced the closure on 28 |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Battlefield Online 📖 2010 - 2013 electronic arts and dice let neowiz rebuild battlefield 2 as a free korean pc bang game and then released it in exactly one country. it launched on 30 march 2010 on the battlefield 2142 engine, with maps that took a hundred players where the original took sixty four. the korean shooter market alread |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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EA Black Box 📖 1998 - 2013 ea black box was an EA-owned game studio in burnaby, canada that defined the import-tuner era of need for speed from 2003 through 2008. it also built the skate trilogy, which remains the best skateboarding game series since tony hawk. EA renamed it quicklime games in july 2012 to handle the dying ne |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Kingdom Hearts Mobile 📖 2008 - 2013 for four and a half years square enix kept a small 2d world running on japanese feature phones, where you walked a kingdom hearts avatar between a point bank and a shop that sold ringtones. it was tied to ntt docomo and never released outside japan, and the clothes your avatar wore were unlocked by |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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WWE All Stars 📖 2011 - 2013 aubrey sitterson, an interactive marketing manager at wwe games, confirmed on twitter that the servers were off. that was the announcement. thq had published the game in march 2011, filed chapter 11 that december and gone under the hammer in january 2013, so by april there was nobody left to write a |
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|1982-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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LucasArts 📖 1982 - 2013 lucasarts started in may 1982 as a small games division inside george lucas's film company. it became the dominant point-and-click adventure-game studio of the 90s with the monkey island series and grim fandango on the scumm engine. after the mid-2000s the catalog leaned heavily on star wars action |
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|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Star Wars 1313 📖 2012 - 2013 on 3 april 2013 disney ended internal development at lucasarts, kept fewer than ten people to administer licenses, and took the studio's nearly finished games down with the studio. star wars 1313 was the one people mourned. it was a ground-level crime story set in the underworld of coruscant, its he |
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|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes 📖 2011 - 2013 electronic arts closed this one before it ever left beta. wrath of heroes was mythic taking the art and the lore of warhammer online and rebuilding them into a six-a-side arena game with three teams fighting on the same map, free to play, no subscription. open beta started on 10 april 2012. eleven m |
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|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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DGamer 📖 2008 - 2013 dgamer was disney's social network for nintendo ds players. it lived on top of the nintendo wi-fi connection and disappeared the day nintendo retired that service in march 2013. about thirty disney ds titles were wired into it. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Survival Project 📖 2003 - 2013 four closings over nine years, and only the last one counted. the international servers went in october 2004 and the malaysian english ones in march 2007, with japan in between: gungho let the license lapse in august 2006. korea kept playing until 24 february 2013, which is the date the whole game s |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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PlanetQuake 📖 1996 - 2013 planetquake was a fan site for one game that turned into a company. mark surfas built it in 1996 to host and distribute the mods people were making for quake, and the traffic those mods brought made it one of the busiest gaming sites on the early web. it became the flagship of the planet network, wh |
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|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Junction Point Studios 📖 2004 - 2013 warren spector spent the 2000s trying to find a publisher that would let him keep making immersive sims. junction point was the studio he opened to attempt it. valve picked it up to do a half-life 2 episode that never shipped, then disney bought the whole studio in 2007 and assigned it to a wii game |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Frenzoo 📖 2010 - 2013 a studio killed its own world to go chase phones. frenzoo was a unity browser world out of hong kong where you dressed an avatar and then showed it to people, and it worked well enough to put 112,728 posts on its forum by april 2012. six days after the last capture of a working world, the company wa |
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|1990-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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THQ 📖 1990 - 2013 thq was founded in april 1990 by jack friedman. the name stood for toy headquarters and the first few years were action-figure manufacturing tied to wwf and other licensing deals. the company turned into a pure video-game publisher by 1994 and grew through the 2000s on saints row, the wwe games, dar |
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|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Vigil Games 📖 2005 - 2013 no bid came in. every other thq development studio found a buyer at the january 2013 auction and vigil did not, because it had shipped darksiders ii five months earlier and had nothing close to release. the unannounced project was a new ip codenamed crawler, and a new ip is the one asset a distresse |
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|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Family Guy Online 📖 2012 - 2013 family guy online was a browser mmo built for fox around a cartoon at the height of its ratings. it opened in public beta on 17 april 2012 with the show's own voice cast recording the quest lines, and it never got out of beta. the notice went up in december 2012 and the servers stopped on 18 january |
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|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Indiana Jones Adventure World 📖 2011 - 2013 zynga boston shipped adventure world on facebook on 1 september 2011, the first ville-family game with a non-farm theme. on 29 november 2011 the game was rebranded indiana jones adventure world under a lucasarts license, indy himself was added as a companion npc for one chapter. eleven months later |
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|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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GameShark 📖 1996 - 2012 gameshark let you type twelve characters of hexadecimal into a console and change what a game believed about itself. datel built the hardware in england, interact put an american name on the box in 1996, and for about six years it was a thirty million dollar business selling a memory card that also |
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|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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PetVille 📖 2010 - 2012 petville was a facebook pet simulation game zynga released in 2010, the pet themed sibling of farmville and fishville. you adopted a pixel pet and decorated a house for it. zynga's only path to revenue was making you pay real money for virtual coins for the food you needed to keep the pet alive. pea |
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|1988-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Nintendo Power 📖 1988 - 2012 the official nintendo of america print magazine. born july 1988 with a free 3.6 million copy run mailed out to fun club members. ended at issue 285 in december 2012 when nintendo declined to renew the licensing deal with future publishing. twenty-four years of strategy guides, foldout maps, and the |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Glitch 📖 2011 - 2012 glitch was a flash-based browser mmo built by tiny speck, the studio stewart butterfield founded after leaving yahoo in 2008. it ran on charm rather than combat: players cooked and gathered and socialized in a 2d world dreamed up inside the brains of giants. the game launched on september 27, 2011, |
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|1988-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Eurocom 📖 1988 - 2012 around seventy shipped games in twenty four years, and the front of the box almost never said eurocom. the derby studio did bond, mortal kombat, crash bandicoot, disney, buffy, the wii goldeneye remake, and three games of its own that almost nobody bought. 007 legends came out in october 2012 to the |
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|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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FishVille 📖 2009 - 2012 fishville shipped on facebook 6 november 2009 as zynga's aquarium sibling to farmville. you bought pixel fish, fed them through three growth stages, sold them for sand coins. 1.6 million monthly active users by october 2011. announced for shutdown 2 november 2012, went dark on 5 december 2012 as the |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Vampire Wars 📖 2008 - 2012 vampire wars shipped on facebook in june 2008 as zynga's vampire-themed version of mafia wars. clan-recruitment and turn-based combat, real money for premium blood credits. by 2009 it was one of zynga's most popular facebook titles, then mafia wars caught it and pulled away. by november 2012 the gam |
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|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Treasure Isle 📖 2010 - 2012 treasure isle shipped on facebook 4 april 2010 as zynga's beach-dig game, the ville-family cousin that swapped fields for sand and gems for coins. energy timers, wall-post gifts, palm-tree islands. by late 2012 it had drifted well off its peak and mark pincus called an eleven-title cost cut. treasur |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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RewardVille 📖 2011 - 2012 twenty-one months is how long zynga ran a loyalty scheme across its own games. rewardville handed out zcoins and zpoints for playing farmville or cityville, capped at 300 points a day, redeemable for items you could only ever use back inside the same games. lady gaga and pizza hut both ran campaigns |
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|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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City of Heroes 📖 2004 - 2012 city of heroes was a superhero subscription mmo. ncsoft pulled the plug in november 2012 with about a hundred thousand active subscribers still on the rolls. fans grieved publicly and unusually loud. seven years later a private rogue server's source code leaked and the community rebuilt the game fro |
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|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Final Fantasy XIV (1.0) 📖 2010 - 2012 square enix shipped a numbered final fantasy as an mmo in september 2010 and it landed at 49 on metacritic, which for that name was less a bad score than an incident. the monthly fee was suspended almost at once and stayed suspended for over a year while the producer and director were removed and na |
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|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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High Impact Games 📖 2004 - 2012 a burbank studio full of insomniac alumni made the ratchet and clank games that fit on a psp, starting with size matters in february 2007 and finishing with a disney princess title in september 2012. the company was closed that november without a press release. nobody turned the website off: highimp |
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|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Phantasy Star Universe 📖 2006 - 2012 phantasy star universe was sega's attempt to take phantasy star online's offline-plus-online formula into a wider mmo experience. it shipped on pc and ps2 in august 2006, then xbox 360 four months later. metacritic reviews landed in the high 50s on pc and high 60s on ps2. servers wound down in regio |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Black Prophecy 📖 2011 - 2012 a studio of about fifty people in hannover spent five years on a space combat mmo where you bolted your own ship together out of parts instead of picking one off a list. reakktor media lost its first publisher when 10tacle studios went bankrupt in 2008 and kept going anyway, with gamigo picking up t |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising 📖 2011 - 2012 announced in march 2005 for a release later that same year, gods and heroes reached players in june 2011 with a different company's name on the box. perpetual entertainment shelved it in october 2007 to save star trek online and then folded anyway, and heatwave interactive bought the rights in febru |
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|1984-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Psygnosis 📖 1984 - 2012 psygnosis was put together in liverpool in 1984 out of the wreck of imagine software, and for a decade its owl on a red border was the mark that told you an amiga game had been taken seriously. sony bought it in 1993 for twenty million pounds and got wipeout out of the deal, which is most of the rea |
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|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Planet Half-Life 📖 1999 - 2012 planet half-life started as one fan's news page about a single game and became the biggest site in gamespy's planet network, which for about a decade was where pc gaming kept its files. it ran news on valve, walkthroughs nobody was paid to write, forums with a technical support board, and free hosti |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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TeamXbox 📖 2000 - 2012 teamxbox was the ign-owned xbox fan-community and news site that ran from 2000 to 2012. brent soboleski and steve barton founded it around the original xbox launch. ign bought it in october 2003. the news desk stopped updating in august 2012 and the site was left as an archive until the domain went |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Microsoft Flight 📖 2012 - 2012 released on 29 february 2012 and canceled on 25 july 2012, which is one hundred and forty seven days of life for a product meant to carry the flight simulator name into the free-to-play era. it shipped with one aircraft and one island, and everything else was sold through the games for windows marke |
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|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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ijji 📖 2006 - 2012 nhn built an american front door for korean free-to-play games and then sold the door. ijji ran gunz and soldier front off one login and one wallet, and it passed ten million registered accounts doing it. the portal did not collapse and it did not run out of players. it was sold in january 2012 and |
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|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Kung Fu Panda World 📖 2010 - 2012 kung fu panda world was dreamworks animation's browser world for children, built by humanature studios over two and a half years for around ten million dollars. it opened on 12 april 2010 with a free tier paid for by advertising and a subscription behind it. on 15 july 2012 the servers went off and |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Rockstar Vancouver 📖 1998 - 2012 six developers walked out of radical entertainment in 1998 and started barking dog studios in vancouver, where they built most of a counter-strike beta update and then homeworld: cataclysm. take-two bought them in 2002 for around nine million dollars and the original name went away. as rockstar vanc |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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8Realms 📖 2011 - 2012 8realms was a browser-based massively multiplayer strategy game by runescape studio jagex. the closed beta opened on 5 may 2011 with a civilization-style build-your-empire loop that spanned eight historical ages, ancient through future. players competed on culture, wealth and military power inside a |
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|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Restaurant City 📖 2009 - 2012 april 2009, and playfish put a restaurant on facebook where the staff were your actual friends, listed by name and photograph. it reached over eighteen million monthly players that winter, then shrank to under two million by 2012 while ea, which had bought the studio in november 2009, worked through |
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|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Habbo Hotel (peak era) 📖 2000 - 2012 dormant the pixel-art virtual hotel where you were a small standing avatar in a pixel hotel room. you decorated rooms. you traded furniture. you flirted with strangers in safe-chat-filtered text. peak around 2008 with about 9 million monthly active users. a 2012 child safety scandal effectively ended the or |
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|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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38 Studios 📖 2006 - 2012 38 studios was the kind of game studio whose collapse you read about on engadget the morning after, not the kind you ever interacted with. curt schilling (the red sox world series pitcher) set it up in september 2006 to build a high-fantasy mmorpg called copernicus that would launch into a market al |
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|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative 📖 2001 - 2012 three coworkers started it as a side project in 1996 and there were five people left on it by the time it shipped in 2001. jumpgate asked you to fly a ship with a stick and with momentum that did not stop when you let go of the throttle, which is most of the reason the people who loved it never got |
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|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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EA Sports MMA 📖 2010 - 2012 dana white told fighters that anyone who did business with ea would not be in the ufc, and that threat shaped this game before a single copy shipped. ea sports mma came out in october 2010 with strikeforce and japan's dream instead of the promotion everyone actually watched. reviews were good, sales |
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|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Qore 📖 2008 - 2012 from june 2008 sony sold a monthly video magazine on the north american playstation store, made by future publishing and hosted by veronica belmont and audrey cleo, at $2.99 an issue or $24.99 for thirteen. what subscribers were really buying was early access, since the beta invitations for socom, r |
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|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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EverQuest Online Adventures 📖 2003 - 2012 everquest online adventures was the playstation 2 mmo that did not need a hard drive. sony online entertainment launched it on 11 february 2003 to give console players a permanent norrath to log into, set 500 years before the original pc everquest. for nine years it ran on the ps2 network adapter al |
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|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Infantry Online 📖 1999 - 2012 infantry online was a top-down team shooter drawn in sprites, split into dozens of separate zones that each played by their own rules. harmless games built it in 1999 and sony bought the studio a year later. it went from free to a $6.95 subscription and back to free again under station pass, and it |
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|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Cosmic Rift 📖 2001 - 2012 cosmic rift was sony's top-down two-dimensional space shooter, built by jeff petersen, who had written subspace at virgin interactive four years earlier. it ran from april 2001 to 29 march 2012, free through a long open beta and then on a subscription, and free again once station pass was rebuilt. s |
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|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Zipper Interactive 📖 1995 - 2012 sony closed it on 29 march 2012 and gave the reason as resource re-alignment, which is a phrase that means a spreadsheet. the redmond studio had spent its first six years making windows flight and mech games, then spent ten more building socom for the playstation 2 and shipping a usb headset in the |
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| RIP |
|1973-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Hudson Soft 📖 1973 - 2012 hudson started as an amateur radio shop in sapporo in 1973, run by two brothers who named it after a steam locomotive. it became the first company nintendo ever licensed to make famicom software, it made bomberman, and it designed the pc engine with nec. konami bought its way in during 2001 and took |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition 📖 2011 - 2012 one hundred and forty six days is the entire shelf life of a zelda game. nintendo put four swords anniversary edition on dsiware at a price of zero for the series 25th birthday, and when the birthday was over the listing came down instead of going paid. grezzo had rebuilt a game that originally need |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Earthrise 📖 2011 - 2012 4 february 2011 to 9 february 2012. masthead studios in sofia spent years on a skill-based post-apocalyptic mmo with open pvp and a player-run economy, put it out to review scores in the fifties and sixties, then said in public that it had gone out too soon. internal testing put the remaining work a |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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LEGO Universe 📖 2010 - 2012 lego universe was lego group's subscription mmo for nine to twelve year olds, developed by netdevil and shipped on october 26, 2010. by november 2011 it had nearly two million registered players, but the conversion rate from the free zone to paid subscription was not high enough to cover the cost of |
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|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Meteor Games 📖 2007 - 2012 adam and donna powell sold neopets to viacom for $160 million in 2005 and started meteor games two years later in beverly hills, with ninety or so people and a plan to put pet-site engagement on facebook. island paradise got them past ten million users in 2010 and carried the company for a while. la |
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|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Crazyracing AirRider 📖 2009 - 2012 nexon opened the beta on 21 july 2009 and shipped its last update three months after that. the flying sequel to kartrider then sat on live servers, unpatched, for twenty-six months while the player count drained out of it. service ended on 12 january 2012 and the stated reason was falling concurrent |
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|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Fallout Online 📖 2007 - 2012 $5,750,000 bought bethesda the fallout intellectual property in april 2007, and the one thing it did not buy was the right to turn the series into an mmo. interplay kept that under conditions it was never going to meet. what followed was not development but litigation, ending on 9 january 2012 with |
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|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Akella 📖 1995 - 2012 akella was a moscow publisher named after the wolf that leads the pack in kipling's jungle book, founded in 1995 and grown into five development teams with a localization department and a distribution business holding them up. it made sea dogs in 2000 and turned the sequel into the pirates of the ca |
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|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Star Wars Galaxies 📖 2003 - 2011 star wars galaxies launched june 26, 2003. it was developed by sony online entertainment and published by lucasarts. the original pre-cu game had a deep skill tree, player-run cities, and a jedi profession that took months of secret unlocks to reach. the november 2005 new game enhancements rewrote c |
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|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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DoylesRoom 📖 2004 - 2011 an online poker room that rented doyle brunson's name from 2004 and then spent seven years being evicted from one network to the next as each of them in turn stopped accepting american players. it was taken in late may 2011, five weeks after black friday, when indictments unsealed in baltimore seize |
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|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Team Bondi 📖 2003 - 2011 team bondi made one game in seven years and it was good. l.a. noire came out in may 2011 with facial capture nobody had seen before, sold well, and got shown at a film festival. by the end of august the company was in administration, and by 5 october it was in liquidation owing about 1.4 million aus |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Asda Story 📖 2008 - 2011 mgame set 15 march 2011 as the closing date and the players would not accept it, so the company kept the servers running with the cash shop switched off, which is a stranger kind of mercy than it sounds. the second date held. asda story ended in korea on 15 september 2011, six weeks after gamescampu |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Black Rock Studio 📖 1998 - 2011 brighton racing-game studio that started as pixel planet in 1998, became climax brighton under the climax group in 1999, climax racing in 2004, then black rock studio after disney interactive bought it in september 2006. it shipped pure in september 2008 and split/second velocity in may 2010, both w |
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|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Mobsters (Playdom) 📖 2008 - 2011 mobsters was a click-driven mafia game playdom shipped on myspace in july 2008. the title hit 13.5 million installs across myspace and reached the top of the platform charts in september 2008. playdom built a facebook port and a sequel called mobsters 2. disney bought playdom for 763 million dollars |
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|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Akoha 📖 2008 - 2011 a montreal company spent three years trying to turn kindness into a scoring system with physical cards in the loop. you bought a deck, did what a card told you to do for somebody, then handed them the card so they could log the moment and pass it on. akoha called itself the world's first social real |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Blue Tongue Entertainment 📖 1995 - 2011 blue tongue started in melbourne in 1995 doing web work and moved into games with an australian rules football title that reached number three on the local sales chart. thq bought it in november 2004 and it spent the next four years on licensed console work, nicktoons games and film tie-ins on a sch |
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|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Resident Evil Outbreak 📖 2003 - 2011 europe bought this game with the online half removed, which for something designed around four players in a collapsing city is close to selling an empty box. capcom shipped it in japan on 11 december 2003 and in north america the following march, with no voice chat and a menu of preset lines standin |
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|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Kaos Studios 📖 2006 - 2011 a free total-conversion mod that swapped the second world war for the gulf turned into a studio with a payroll. thq hired the desert combat team in january 2006, sat seventy of them in a new york office and called it kaos. two games later the publisher shut the place on 13 june 2011, three months af |
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|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Football Manager Live 📖 2008 - 2011 football manager live was the subscription mmo version of the management game, made by sports interactive and published by sega. it dropped up to a thousand managers into one game world where every real footballer existed exactly once, so signing a player meant taking him off somebody else's list. i |
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|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Legends of Zork 📖 2009 - 2011 legends of zork put the zork license in a browser tab and put a meter on it. you played a traveling salesman recently fired by frobozzco international, walking the great underground empire for zorkmids, with thirty action points a day unless you paid for more. jolt online gaming ran it out of dublin |
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|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Zeebo 📖 2009 - 2011 a qualcomm-and-tectoy joint idea, ship a game console into brazil and mexico that skipped physical media entirely and downloaded everything over 3g. the games catalog stayed thin, the pricing never got low enough against smuggled ps2s and the boxes stopped shipping in 2011. servers followed later th |
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|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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JamLegend 📖 2008 - 2011 two million registered players and a hundred and ten million recorded plays, all of it inside a browser tab with the number row standing in for a fretboard. zynga announced on 19 april 2011 that it was taking the team rather than the product, which is a sentence that has always meant the same thing. |
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|1995-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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JoWooD Entertainment 📖 1995 - 2011 liezen is a town of about eight thousand people in styria, and for a decade it was the head office of a publicly listed video game publisher. jowood put mid-tier european pc games on shelves from 1995, floated on the vienna stock exchange in may 2000, kept the gothic trademark in the divorce from th |
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|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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PSP Go 📖 2009 - 2011 psp go was the umd-drive-removed psp variant sony shipped in october 2009 at $249, with a sliding face and 16gb of internal flash for download-only games. fewer than 30,000 units sold across all of japan in launch month. retailers refused to carry stock. sony quietly killed it outside north america |
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|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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The Agency: Covert Ops 📖 2007 - 2011 sony online entertainment announced a spy mmo in july 2007 for playstation 3 and pc, with no character classes and a promise that one shot to the head killed anybody regardless of level. it showed the game for four years and never opened a public beta. on 31 march 2011 soe cut 205 jobs and closed th |
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|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Faunasphere 📖 2009 - 2011 a browser game about cleaning up a polluted world one animal at a time. big fish games launched it in 2009 and put a facebook version out the next year, then shut the whole thing off in march 2011, less than two years in. it was gentle and slow and the people who played it loved it more than the num |
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|1994-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Bizarre Creations 📖 1994 - 2011 bizarre creations was a british game studio that made the project gotham racing series for microsoft. geometry wars was their tiny inside-joke breakout. activision bought the studio in 2007 for $107 million, then shipped blur to weak sales in 2010 and announced closure in january 2011. former staff |
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|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Propaganda Games 📖 2005 - 2011 vancouver game studio that lived almost entirely inside disney interactive. founded september 2005 by ex-eaa and ex-radical staff, bought by disney within months of opening. shipped turok in 2008 to mixed reviews. its main project pirates of the caribbean armada of the damned was cancelled in octobe |
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|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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The Sims Carnival 📖 2008 - 2011 ea put a game-making tool on the web in february 2008 and hung the sims name on it, so that anybody could assemble a flash game from supplied art and publish it on the same page as everyone else's. every game on the site was open by default, meaning you could take somebody else's and change it as lo |
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|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Blue Mars 📖 2009 - 2011 blue mars was the honolulu-based virtual world platform from avatar reality that opened public beta in september 2009 with the pitch of being a next-generation second life. it ran on the crytek cryengine 2 and shipped with a developer economy where creators could sell items for real money through a |
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|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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gamerDNA 📖 2006 - 2011 gamerdna was a social network for video game players, built around the character you played as rather than the person behind the keyboard. it stored game histories and guild rosters, and kept players in touch as they moved between games and servers. it started in 2006 as guildcafe, took the gamerdna |
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|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Roma Victor 📖 2006 - 2011 a small studio in brighton built thirty square kilometers of second-century britannia and let the local magistrate nail players to a cross for a week at a time. roma victor launched on 14 july 2006 with no subscription and a long list of advertised features missing, and most of them were still missi |
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|1987-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Factor 5 📖 1987 - 2011 cologne, 1987: five people walk out of rainbow arts to work for themselves and spend the next decade pulling more out of cheap hardware than the documentation said was in there. turrican on the c64 and the amiga, and later rogue squadron on the n64 and the game that sold the gamecube. the california |
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|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Ultima Online (the cultural era) 📖 1997 - 2010 dormant the 2D isometric medieval mmorpg from 1997. you were a small avatar in a big shared world. you mined ore. you tamed dragons. you got murdered by a player named SmokyBigD outside britain. peak around 2003 with about 250k subscribers. servers still run in 2026 under ea's broadsword online games studio |
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|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Huxley: The Dystopia 📖 2005 - 2010 webzen showed huxley at e3 in 2005 as one of the first announced unreal engine 3 games and as the mmofps, a persistent-world game with the aiming of a shooter. it took five years to reach a korean open beta on 3 may 2010, by which point the xbox 360 version had been dropped and the western publisher |
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|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Phantasy Star Online 📖 2000 - 2010 sega put a four player action rpg on the dreamcast in december 2000 and made the online half the entire point, which no console game had pulled off before. you dialed a modem into sega's network and stood around in a lobby until you had three strangers to go in with, and they might be typing in a la |
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|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Phoenix Dynasty Online 📖 2006 - 2010 on 9 december 2010 ingle games posted that it was closing every phoenix dynasty online server that day, and then did it. the game was a free to play fantasy mmorpg from object software set in ancient china, running in the mainland since 2006 and in north america since late 2007, paid for by an item |
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|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Thottbot 📖 2001 - 2010 bill dyess started thottbot in 2001 as an mmorpg news site and rebuilt it in 2004 as a searchable database for world of warcraft. the data came from an in-game addon that watched what you looted and let you upload it, which meant the site knew what it knew because millions of players had gone and fo |
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|2010-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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APB - All Points Bulletin 📖 2010 - 2010 apb is the 79-day collapse you cite when somebody asks how fast a triple-a launch can sink. dave jones's gta-meets-mmo burned through somewhere north of $100 million in development. it shipped in june 2010 to reviews in the high fifties and watched its developer realtime worlds go into administratio |
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|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Exteel 📖 2007 - 2010 ncsoft put out a third-person mech shooter on 4 december 2007, korea and north america on the same day, free to download and paid for with nccoins. you built a machine called a mechanaught out of parts, and the parts wore out. some ran on a durability counter tied to time in game, others on a flat s |
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|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Bots!! 📖 2006 - 2010 a korean studio called n-log soft made a game about robots fighting computer viruses, and acclaim games published it in the west in november 2006 as the launch title of a company that had bought a dead publisher's name for about a hundred thousand dollars. it reached a million players by may 2007. p |
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|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Realtime Worlds 📖 2000 - 2010 dundee studio, founded february 7 2000 by david jones after he left dma design behind. it shipped crackdown on xbox 360 in 2007. five years and over a hundred million dollars went into apb all points bulletin. apb launched june 29 2010 with a metacritic of 58 and lost its servers eleven weeks later. |
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|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Playlogic Entertainment 📖 2002 - 2010 playlogic was the largest game publisher the netherlands had, which in practice meant an amsterdam office and a shell company trading over the counter in new york. it published games made by studios across europe and built its own in a breda studio of about eighty people. the title it bet the most o |
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|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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The Chronicles of Spellborn 📖 2008 - 2010 a dutch-developed mmo with a real-time combat system that was unusual for its era. spellborn international launched the european version through frogster on 27 november 2008 and the north american version through acclaim on 23 april 2009. the studio went bankrupt that june. acclaim flipped the game |
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|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Fighter Ace 📖 1997 - 2010 microsoft put its first premium game on the internet gaming zone on 18 december 1997 and charged a dollar ninety-five a day for it. fighter ace was world war two dogfighting with more than a hundred players sharing one arena, which was a genuinely hard thing to make work over the modems of the perio |
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|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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LeapFrog Leapster 📖 2003 - 2010 the leapster was leapfrog's kids handheld. cartridges, a stylus, a screen that played math and reading software dressed up as videogames. it shipped in october '03, sat in the toy aisle next to the v.smile for seven years, then got quietly retired in july '10 when the leapster explorer replaced the |
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|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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GOA 📖 1999 - 2010 goa was france telecom's game portal, live from march 1999 until july 2010. it did matchmaking for free: one chat room per game, rooms you filled with strangers, and a browser plugin called pulsar that threw everybody onto the multiplayer launch screen at the same moment. from 2002 it also published |
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|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Tanarus 📖 1997 - 2010 tanarus was an online tank game that verant interactive built before everquest and sony kept running for twelve and a half years afterward. up to twenty players in an arena, four teams of five. it cost $9.99 a month at the start and nothing at all after 2007, and outside its own regulars almost nobo |
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|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Linux for PlayStation 2 📖 2002 - 2010 sony sold a box that turned a playstation 2 into a linux workstation: two discs, a 40 gb hard drive, a network adapter and a usb keyboard and mouse. it ran a japanese red hat derivative on 32 mb of ram and it was slow, and none of that was the argument. the argument was that the company selling the |
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|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Reflexive Entertainment 📖 1997 - 2010 reflexive entertainment was the casual-game studio behind ricochet lost worlds and big kahuna reef, plus the 2005 igf seumas mcnally winner wik and the fable of souls. founded 1997 in lake forest california by four ex-virgin interactive engineers. amazon bought the company on october 20 2008 for its |
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|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Halo 2 (Xbox Live) 📖 2004 - 2010 microsoft turned off the original xbox live on april 15, 2010. fourteen players refused to log out of halo 2, the last server in the world for the original xbox, and held the match for almost a month. when apache n4sir finally signed off in the early hours of may 11, that was the end of a service th |
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|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Room for PlayStation Portable 📖 2009 - 2010 tokyo game show 2009 got a demo of a psp with a living room inside it. r∞m gave japanese handheld owners a 3d apartment, an avatar, a blog and an album, and invited friends in over the playstation network to stand around in it. sony took signups for eleven days in september, ran a closed beta throug |
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|1988-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Core Design 📖 1988 - 2010 nine people walked out of gremlin graphics in 1988 and set up in derby, and eight years later they made tomb raider, which turned a loss at eidos into a profit inside one financial year. core shipped a sequel every year until the schedule stopped working. the sixth game went out unfinished in june 2 |
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|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Cities XL (Planet Offer) 📖 2009 - 2010 cities xl shipped in october 2009 as a city builder with a subscription layer bolted on top, called the planet offer, where your city sat on a shared persistent planet next to other people's cities and traded resources with them. monte cristo announced on 27 january 2010 that too few players had sub |
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|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Celebdaq 📖 2002 - 2010 the bbc took a mechanic that popex.com had been running on musicians since 1998 and pointed it at celebrities. you got ten thousand pounds of imaginary money, you bought shares in famous people, and every week the game paid a dividend based on how much press each of them had actually generated. it w |
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|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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RedOctane 📖 1999 - 2010 activision paid ninety-nine point nine million dollars in 2006 for a company that had started by renting games through the mail and then moved into dance pads. what it was actually buying was guitar hero, which passed a billion dollars inside twenty-six months. on 11 february 2010 activision closed |
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|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Meridian 59 📖 1996 - 2010 meridian 59 was the first commercial 3D graphical MMORPG, launched 7 october 1996 by archetype interactive under 3DO's publishing label. it predated ultima online by about a year and everquest by more than two years. 3DO shut the game down on 31 august 2000. near death studios (led by kirmse-era vet |
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|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Chromehounds 📖 2006 - 2010 for three and a half years the neroimus war ran on sega's servers, a territorial campaign fought by squads of player-built mechs over a map that changed hands while you were asleep. fromsoftware built the machines and the radio system underneath them, and the offline campaign was mostly a tutorial f |
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|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Dungeon Runners 📖 2007 - 2010 ncsoft's early free-to-play experiment. a diablo-shaped mmo with a self-parody streak and a $4.99 optional membership tier. lasted two and a half years before the studio called it unprofitable and turned it off on new year's day 2010. |
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|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Metaplace 📖 2007 - 2010 metaplace was a platform that let ordinary people build their own virtual worlds in a browser, made by raph koster, the designer behind ultima online and star wars galaxies. every object in a world had its own web address and worlds could link to each other like pages. it opened to everyone in may 2 |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Net Jet 📖 2007 - 2009 hasbro sold american children a game console with no processor in it. the net jet was a gamepad you plugged into a windows pc, which then downloaded the games and ran them, while a plastic key pushed into the top of the controller decided which one you were allowed to play. twelve retail titles, mos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Monopoly City Streets 📖 2009 - 2009 three million in play money and every street google maps knew about, against a server that fell over under the weight of people trying to register. hasbro and its digital agency tribal ddb launched monopoly city streets on 9 september 2009 to advertise a board game, deleted the entire world eight da |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Pandemic Studios 📖 1998 - 2009 pandemic studios was founded in 1998 in westwood, los angeles, by andrew goldman and josh resnick after they left activision. across eleven years it shipped star wars battlefront, battlefront 2, mercenaries, full spectrum warrior, destroy all humans, and the saboteur. elevation partners packaged it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
RealArcade 📖 2001 - 2009 realnetworks built a casual games portal in 2001 and bolted it onto the realplayer install on every windows machine in the country. for eight years it sold zuma, bookworm, build-a-lot and emulated sega genesis cartridges in thirty-minute demo windows. on november thirteenth 2009 the brand was folded |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Metropolis Software 📖 1992 - 2009 metropolis software was founded in warsaw in 1992 by two high school friends and spent seventeen years making adventure games and shooters for a country that had almost no games industry to sell them into. it held the witcher license from around 1997 and got as far as one playable level before the p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
InkBall 📖 2004 - 2009 inkball shipped in august 2004 inside windows xp tablet pc edition 2005, a puzzle game whose only control was a line you drew with a pen. colored balls came out of the board and you drew short strokes to deflect them into holes of the matching color, and each stroke burned away the moment a ball tou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
The Matrix Online 📖 2005 - 2009 the matrix online launched march 22, 2005 as the official continuation of the film trilogy with the wachowskis' blessing. then world of warcraft happened, and matrix online never crossed 50,000 subscribers. warner bros sold the operation to sony online entertainment in june, three months after launc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1958-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Midway Games 📖 1958 - 2009 midway started in 1958 as a chicago amusement-game manufacturer, took over the us license for pac-man in 1980, and ran for fifty-one years before filing chapter 11 in february 2009. warner bros acquired most of the catalog including mortal kombat for thirty-three million dollars on july 10 2009. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Shadowbane 📖 2003 - 2009 shadowbane was a fantasy mmo where the whole world was player-made. guilds raised cities from nothing, then rival guilds sieged and burned them, and losing a fight could cost you your gear. wolfpack studios launched it in 2003 and ubisoft published it, then bought the studio the year after. it never |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Net Yaroze 📖 1996 - 2009 ken kutaragi's idea was that ordinary people should be allowed to program the playstation, and for about $750 sony would sell you a black console with different boot roms, no region lock, a serial cable and a c toolchain. everything you wrote had to fit in 2 megabytes of ram because the machine woul |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Rubies of Eventide 📖 2003 - 2009 a 1998 text mud old enough to ship with a working dos client put a 3d face on itself and relaunched as a paid mmo on 2 june 2003. it died on valentine's day 2004 with 806 paying customers left. two of its developers kept a private server up for friends, fans found the connection, and rubies came bac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Manifesto Games 📖 2005 - 2009 greg costikyan spent the early 2000s arguing in print that the game business had become sequels and licenses with no room left for anything strange, and manifesto games was the store built to sell whatever that argument implied should exist. it was announced on 29 september 2005 and founded that oct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Deadline Games 📖 1996 - 2009 deadline games was a danish studio that spent its first decade making quiz and edutainment titles for a domestic market of five million people, then bought itself out in 2001 and went after consoles. total overdose in 2005 was the one that traveled, a mexico-set shooter with combo scoring that revie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Baby Shaker 📖 2009 - 2009 ninety nine cents bought a black and white drawing of a crying baby and a timer that counted up while you tried to calm it. shaking the phone put two red crosses over the baby's eyes and stopped the crying, which was the joke and also the whole game. apple approved it and sold it for two days in apr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ascaron 📖 1991 - 2009 ascaron spent eighteen years in gütersloh making trading simulations that were enormous inside germany and barely registered outside it, then made sacred, which sold everywhere. sacred 2 cost something like twenty million euros and took years longer than planned, and the company filed for insolvency |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
XLEAGUE.TV 📖 2007 - 2009 in 2007 a british company decided competitive gaming was a television format and bought satellite carriage to prove it. xleague.tv sat on sky channel 291 with electronic sports league and ukesa coverage wrapped in studio shows, with guru larry doing retro segments. the audience for this was already |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Tabula Rasa 📖 2007 - 2009 tabula rasa was richard garriott's other life. ultima online made his name. this was the follow-up: an MMO set in space, eight years in development, published by NCsoft, marketed around garriott himself going to the international space station while the game was running live. it shipped in november |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Free Radical Design 📖 1999 - 2009 free radical was the studio four senior rare developers opened in 1999 to keep making the kind of arcade-feel console shooters they had built on the n64. the timesplitters trilogy on ps2 and xbox between 2000 and 2005 was the peak. the studio carried a reputation for fast first-person multiplayer in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Hellgate - London 📖 2007 - 2009 hellgate london was the diablo team's first act after they left blizzard. it was supposed to be the next great isometric action-rpg with a first-person camera bolted on. instead it shipped half-finished in 2007, and the studio went bankrupt nine months after that. the western servers went off in jan |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ensemble Studios 📖 1995 - 2009 ensemble studios was the dallas rts house that built the age of empires series across twelve years and three full installments, then closed the day halo wars went gold. microsoft acquired them in 2001 for around a hundred million dollars. the shutdown was announced in september 2008 and finalized on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Fantasy Congress 📖 2006 - 2009 on monday 23 october 2006 four students at claremont mckenna college put up a game in which you drafted real members of the united states house and senate and collected points as their bills moved through the legislative process. six thousand people had signed up within days and npr had them on air |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Incognito Entertainment 📖 1999 - 2009 sony bought incognito entertainment in august 2002 with fifty-one people inside it, and by 2009 there was almost nobody left to close. twisted metal: black in 2001 and warhawk in 2007 both came out of this salt lake city studio. scott campbell and david jaffe walked out in july 2007 with most of the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Dark and Light 📖 2006 - 2008 a courtroom in france settled this one. npcube, a five-person studio on reunion island, shipped an mmo in june 2006 that promised a world of 39,000 square kilometers and delivered something reviewers could barely run. vworld sued over copied content in april 2007, npcube counter-sued for 710,000 eur |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Championship Gaming Series 📖 2007 - 2008 directv put more than fifty million dollars of news corporation money into turning competitive gaming into a television league with salaried city franchises and a draft held at the playboy mansion. the reported audience was fifty million people and nine out of ten of them were in asia, watching on s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Fury 📖 2007 - 2008 fury was an mmo with the world taken out of it. no quests and no leveling curve, only arenas where players fought each other with instant-cast spells and no cooldowns. auran spent a reported $13.2 million on it and shipped it on 16 october 2007 at retail price. eight weeks later it stopped charging |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
The Sims Online 📖 2002 - 2008 the sims online launched december 17, 2002 from maxis and ea. it was the sims you knew from the boxed game, except your neighbors were other paying subscribers. will wright pitched it as an interactive look at the emerging social web. it never crossed 105k active subscribers, well below ea's interna |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Scrabulous 📖 2006 - 2008 scrabulous was the unofficial scrabble that facebook picked up before hasbro did. two brothers in kolkata shipped it in 2006, it hit half a million monthly players on the facebook app platform, and then the hasbro/mattel legal team caught up and pulled the plug. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sierra Entertainment 📖 1979 - 2008 sierra started in 1979 in simi valley as on-line systems, founded by ken and roberta williams. roberta wrote mystery house in 1980, the first computer adventure game with graphics, and the company moved to oakhurst in the sierra nevada foothills and renamed itself sierra on-line in 1982. through the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Front Mission Online 📖 2005 - 2008 front mission online took a japanese tactics series about mechs called wanzers and turned it into a real time mmo on the playstation 2. it launched on 12 may 2005 and ran on playonline, square enix's own network, on a subscription. it never left japan. square enix closed the servers on 31 may 2008 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Virtual Magic Kingdom 📖 2005 - 2008 VMK was disney's promo MMO for the 50th anniversary of disneyland. it ran from may '05 to may '08 as a sulake-built virtual theme park where kids walked an avatar through the themed lands and collected virtual items from disney's minigames. disney closed it on schedule three years after launch and i |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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The All-Seeing Eye 📖 2001 - 2008 the all-seeing eye was a windows program that told you which game servers were alive and what your ping to them looked like, across dozens of games at once. a finnish outfit called udp soft spent two years building it and put it out as shareware on 15 june 2001. by the time yahoo bought it in septem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Stormfront Studios 📖 1988 - 2008 fourteen million copies sold and over half a billion dollars at retail across twenty years, and the studio still could not survive its publisher going away. stormfront opened in san rafael in december 1988, put the first graphical mmorpg on america online in 1991, and then spent a decade making comp |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Iron Lore Entertainment 📖 2000 - 2008 iron lore was the studio brian sullivan opened with paul chieffo in 2000 in maynard massachusetts after leaving ensemble. titan quest in june 2006 was their only original release. a diablo-shaped action rpg with ancient mythology aesthetics, published by thq, that reviewed in the low-80s metacritic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Perpetual Entertainment 📖 2002 - 2008 perpetual took on two massively multiplayer games at once before it had shipped a single one. gods and heroes: rome rising was announced in march 2005 for release that same year and was still unfinished two years later. star trek online was the most valuable unbuilt license in the genre and perpetua |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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Game Boy Micro 📖 2005 - 2008 game boy micro was nintendo shrinking the game boy advance down to roughly the size of an nes controller, with a two inch backlit screen and swappable faceplates, out on 13 september 2005 at ninety-nine dollars. it is the best-looking handheld the company ever built and it landed ten months after th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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FUN Technologies 📖 2002 - 2007 a company built on one legal distinction: a game of skill is not gambling. fun technologies bought skilljam and then worldwinner and ran paid tournaments where north americans put up entry fees to play bejeweled and solitaire against each other for money, which was lawful in most of the places onlin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
MyCoke / Coke Studios 📖 2002 - 2007 coke studios was a coca-cola corporate virtual world for american teenagers, built in 2002 by atlanta digital agency studiocom using the habbo engine licensed from sulake. players socialized in public spaces themed after san francisco and goa and tokyo, mixed music tracks at desks, decorated rooms. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Telenet Japan 📖 1983 - 2007 telenet japan spent twenty-four years making games that reached the west under somebody else's label. valis and cosmic fantasy were its own, and the wolf team studio inside it produced the staff who later built star ocean and the tales games for other companies. pachinko software and a failing ameri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Shiny Entertainment 📖 1993 - 2007 laguna beach, october 1993. david perry left virgin games to run his own studio and spent the first two years on a cartoon earthworm wearing a robot suit. after that shiny belonged to interplay, and then to atari for forty-seven million dollars. foundation 9 bought it last and on 9 october 2007 merg |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Auto Assault 📖 2006 - 2007 auto assault was the post-apocalyptic vehicular mmo from ncsoft and netdevil that lasted sixteen months. it shipped on 13 april 2006 with three factions, a third-person shooter combat layer, and no death penalty in a market that wow had already sucked dry. reviews were not unkind. subscribers never |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE 📖 2006 - 2007 1,200 yen every thirty days bought you a desk in a fictional japanese high school, where the thing you did in place of fighting monsters was go to class and talk to people through a word filter strict enough that players complained about it for the entire run. konami announced the end on 7 march 200 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
World Chess Network 📖 1997 - 2007 a paid internet chess server from 1997, put together by master games international with money from the chess patron dato tan chin nam. it sold the room around the game rather than the game, and its best invention was banter chess, where a titled player took on a real opponent and talked through ever |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Tales of Eternia ONLINE 📖 2006 - 2007 諸般の事情 is the reason namco gave, which comes out in english as various circumstances and explains nothing at all. this was the tales series' first mmorpg and the company's first of any kind, built with dwango, announced for a spring 2005 launch and dragged into march 2006 by delays. the closing notic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Clover Studio 📖 2004 - 2007 clover studio was capcom letting its best directors run their own subsidiary for less than three years. it made okami and god hand back to back in 2006, both of which are now treated as classics and both of which sold badly enough at the time to end the experiment. capcom announced the dissolution o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Dragon's Gate 📖 1990 - 2007 dragon's gate opened to the public on genie in the spring of 1990 and ran for seventeen years as a text world with live game masters staging scenarios inside it. six dollars an hour was the price at the start. it moved to aol in 1996 and finished on an independent machine after mythic dropped it in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet 📖 1995 - 2007 the windows pinball that came with every microsoft plus! pack and then every copy of windows from 98 through xp. you launched it because the start menu was right there. nobody finished it. it disappeared in vista because a 64-bit collision bug let the ball clip through the table, and microsoft decid |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Ritual Entertainment 📖 1996 - 2007 dallas in 1996 was full of studios spun out of the quake and duke nukem level scene, and ritual was one of the good ones. it shipped sin six weeks ahead of half-life and got flattened by the comparison, then made heavy metal f.a.k.k. 2 and star trek elite force ii for other publishers, then spent te |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
HyperScan 📖 2006 - 2007 mattel's answer to the question nobody asked: what if a console made you buy trading cards to unlock the characters. an rfid reader sat in the lid and the booster packs cost ten dollars for six random cards. it went on sale on 23 october 2006 at $69.99 and was on clearance at $9.99 within months. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Melbourne House 📖 1977 - 2006 melbourne house was a london publisher run by two australians who had moved the other way, and its biggest game was a tolkien text adventure that sold over half a million copies on the strength of a parser nobody else had written. the way of the exploding fist did the same job for one-on-one fightin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
HotPrize 📖 1999 - 2006 "hotprize.com is no more!" said the front page on monday, 13 november 2006, adding a very slim chance of being reborn that never came. for seven years a company in albany, new york ran free java games next to sponsor banners and paid the winners in tokens, and tokens bought spins on prize wheels. mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Cartoon Orbit 📖 2000 - 2006 cartoon orbit was the trading-card site cartoon network ran on cartoonnetwork.com from november 2000 to october 16 2006. the cards were called ctoons, animation cells pulled from network shows that members collected and traded in an in-site shopfront economy. sam register built it as a sticker-world |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Triton 📖 2004 - 2006 july 2006 was the month a digital storefront nobody had heard of got one of the biggest pc releases of the year. triton, built by digital interactive streams and known as game xstream until that may, sold prey as a download that started playing before it finished arriving. three months later the com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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MSN Gaming Zone 📖 1996 - 2006 msn gaming zone was microsoft's online gaming portal from 1996 to 2006. it started life as the village in 1996, got bought by microsoft and renamed the internet gaming zone, then simplified to zone.com. it ran asheron's call and allegiance on the premium side, and it was also the matchmaking service |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Rockstar Vienna 📖 1993 - 2006 on the night of 9 may 2006 take-two closed its vienna studio, and the hundred and ten people who worked there found out the next morning, when security guards would not let them through the entrance. the company had been neo software since 1993 and was the largest game developer in austria by the ti |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1955-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Namco 📖 1955 - 2006 masaya nakamura put two coin operated rocking horses on a department store roof in yokohama in 1955 and ended up owning the arcade business. pac-man came out of that company twenty five years later and is still the most recognizable object the medium has produced. bandai bought namco in a deal worth |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
PopTop Software 📖 1993 - 2006 phil steinmeyer started poptop in 1993 in fenton, missouri, and wrote most of railroad tycoon ii himself. it shipped in 1998 under the gathering of developers label and sold well past anyone's projection, on a series sid meier had not touched in eight years. take-two bought the studio in july 2000 f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1955-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Takara 📖 1955 - 2006 takara made licca-chan dolls and the transforming robot toys that hasbro licensed and renamed transformers in 1984, which means most of the world owned its products without ever seeing its name. beyblade paid for the end of the nineties. an electric car and a home electronics line lost the money bac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
JAMDAT Mobile 📖 2000 - 2006 jamdat was the largest mobile games publisher in the world for about two years, back when a mobile game meant a java file bought off a carrier menu for three dollars. it was started in march 2000 by people who had left activision, and it sold to electronic arts for 680 million dollars in cash fourte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Gizmondo 📖 2005 - 2006 gizmondo was a windows ce handheld game console with gps, a camera, a sim slot, and a business model that involved subsidizing the hardware with delivery of "smart ads" to your screen while you played. it launched in march 2005, sold fewer than 25,000 units, lost about $300 million, and was liquidat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Digital Anvil 📖 1996 - 2006 chris roberts walked out of origin systems and opened digital anvil in austin on 8 april 1996, with his brother erin, six other wing commander people and robert rodriguez the film director on the founder list. microsoft and amd paid for it. the pitch was a space game with no seams in it, demoed in 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Uproar.com 📖 1999 - 2006 uproar.com sold the television game show with the studio taken out of it. the company licensed family feud and match game from pearson, put them in a browser window and ran them for prizes. vivendi universal bought it in february 2001 for about a hundred and forty million dollars and folded it into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Davilex Games 📖 1995 - 2006 103,000 copies in nine months of 1998, in germany alone, for a budget racing game about driving down a motorway. davilex was an accounting-software company in houten that started publishing games in the early nineties, and its one commercial idea was to take the road outside the window and ship it: |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sega Pico 📖 1993 - 2005 sega pico was a kids edutainment console built on mega drive hardware, sold like a toy, played through a hardback book whose pages turned the cartridge into the next lesson. it ran in japan from 1993 to 2005, did fine there, sold three point four million units, then quietly handed the franchise to i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Working Designs 📖 1986 - 2005 working designs was the cult north american localizer that put japanese rpgs on disc-based consoles with full english voice acting and elaborate boxed packaging. victor ireland founded it in 1986 as a software company, then pivoted to game publishing in 1990. the catalog ran on the lunar series for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sakura Wars Online 📖 2001 - 2005 sega walked out of the console business in january 2001 and shipped this in december. two dreamcast discs went on sale the same day, one set in the imperial capital and one in paris, both of them doors into the same online town where you played cards and mahjong against the series cast and against w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Virgin Interactive 📖 1983 - 2005 virgin games started in london in 1983 inside richard branson's group and spent the next twenty years being bought and renamed by people who wanted something else in the building. it published command & conquer and the disney platformers across europe, and it owned westwood studios until electronic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Coktel Vision 📖 1984 - 2005 coktel vision was two companies wearing one name. one of them made adventure games with a french sense of humor and the other made adibou, which had passed a million and a half copies by 1997 and taught a generation of french four year olds to read off a cd-rom. sierra bought it in 1993 and after th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Steel Battalion: Line of Contact 📖 2004 - 2005 capcom gave notice that between 10am and noon pacific on friday 30 september 2005 it would end the online campaign of steel battalion: line of contact, because the user base was no longer at a level that made the service feasible. the game had been online-only since 26 february 2004, which gave the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Blizzard North 📖 1993 - 2005 in june 2003 four executives sent one email to vivendi asking for financial protection and a straight answer about whether blizzard was being sold. vivendi accepted the resignations the same day. the studio that had made diablo carried on for two more years on a version of diablo iii that nobody out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Team Silent 📖 1996 - 2005 on 1 april 2005 konami swapped one share of konami computer entertainment tokyo for one share of itself, and the subsidiary stopped existing. team silent was the horror group inside that building, credited under a name that was never really a company. it made four silent hill games in five years and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Games Domain 📖 1994 - 2005 a birmingham developer named dave stanworth put games domain online in march 1994, which made it older than most of the industry it covered. it ran a downloads archive of demos and patches alongside its own review magazine, and by 2002 it was pulling fifteen million page views a month. then it chang |
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|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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Troika Games 📖 1998 - 2005 three of the people behind the original fallout walked out of interplay on april fools day 1998 and named the studio after the russian word for a set of three. they shipped three games in seven years and every one of them was ambitious and full of bugs on release day. the last one came out on the sa |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Ion Storm 📖 1996 - 2005 john romero and tom hall left id software in 1996 and took the 54th floor of a dallas skyscraper before they had shipped anything. the ad said john romero was about to make you his bitch, and then daikatana arrived three years late to reviews that were merely fine. the austin half of the same compan |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
GP32 📖 2001 - 2005 i missed the gp32. the korean linux handheld from game park shipped in november 2001 and almost nobody outside of the homebrew forums had one. by 2007 the worldwide total was around 32,000 units. the device was never properly distributed in turkey. its actual legacy was the homebrew scene that grew |
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| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Titus Interactive 📖 1985 - 2005 titus was a french publisher that spent twenty years being competent and unglamorous, and is now remembered almost entirely for one nintendo 64 game about flying superman through rings in green fog. the caen brothers built it out of home computer titles in the late eighties, then spent the end of th |
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| RIP |
|1971-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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ELORG 📖 1971 - 2005 moscow, 1971: the soviet ministry of foreign trade opened one office holding a monopoly on every computer that crossed the border in either direction, and called it elektronorgtechnica. for eighteen years it moved hardware and rebadged elektronika calculators for export. then a researcher at the aca |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
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Game Neverending 📖 2002 - 2004 vancouver, 2002: a tiny company started building a massively multiplayer game with no winning condition, where you made objects by combining other objects and otherwise just talked. the public alpha opened in september 2002 and the thing never got out of beta. the sharing tool built inside it was pu |
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| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Argonaut Games 📖 1982 - 2004 the london game studio jez san founded in february 1982 at age 16, named after his initials and the jason myth. peaked in 1993 when its custom super fx chip shipped inside star fox on the snes, the first console title most players associated with polygonal 3d. went public in 1999, ran out of publish |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Earth & Beyond 📖 2002 - 2004 earth and beyond was westwood's last shipped game. ea published it in september 2002 with three races and three professions in a deep-space sandbox aimed at the everquest crowd. it never built a real subscriber base. ea closed the servers in september 2004, six months after westwood itself was disso |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Gathering of Developers 📖 1998 - 2004 a rented parking lot across the street from e3, with free barbecue and a stage on it, was most of the marketing budget. gathering of developers opened in dallas on 13 january 1998 as a publisher owned by the studios it published, with 3d realms and epic among the founding partners, and it shipped ra |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Acclaim Entertainment 📖 1987 - 2004 acclaim entertainment was a long island console publisher founded in 1987 by greg fischbach, robert holmes, and james scoroposki. it ran the home-port pipeline for mortal kombat and nba jam, picked up the n64 turok franchise in 1997, then published burnout 1 and 2 in the early 2000s. accounting scan |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
WON.net 📖 1998 - 2004 won was the matchmaking spine behind half-life's first six years online. valve built steam in secret while still on sierra's publishing deal, then patched its games to require it. WON's user base walked out the door without noticing it had moved. |
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| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Delphine Software International 📖 1988 - 2004 delphine software was paid for by piano records. paul de senneville produced richard clayderman, and in 1988 he put the money from that into a paris game studio, which then shipped two of the most copied games europe ever made: another world in 1991 and flashback in 1992. the rest of the nineties we |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Smilebit 📖 2000 - 2004 on 1 july 2004 sega pulled six studio subsidiaries back into itself in a single movement, and smilebit was one of them, four years old to the day. it had been assembled out of the old r&d6 to make japanese sports management sims and ended up making jet set radio future and panzer dragoon orta for mi |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Papyrus Design Group 📖 1987 - 2004 seventeen years of one idea, held without blinking: that a racing game should model the car rather than the feeling of the car. david kaemmer and omar khudari started papyrus in watertown in 1987 and shipped indianapolis 500 two years later with adjustable suspension in it, which nobody had done. si |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Impressions Games 📖 1989 - 2004 david lester founded impressions in britain in 1989 and sold it to sierra in 1995. from an office in cambridge, massachusetts it made caesar iii and pharaoh, and in 1998 it was the most profitable division of havas interactive, ahead of blizzard. vivendi universal closed it in the spring of 2004, we |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Origin Systems 📖 1983 - 2004 origin systems was founded on march 4 1983 by richard garriott (lord british) with his brother robert and father owen. across two decades it shipped the ultima series, the wing commander series, and ultima online in 1997, which set the template for the entire western mmo genre. ea bought the studio |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
BarrysWorld 📖 1998 - 2004 a few people running clan servers in britain turned them into a public service in 1998 and gave away free game hosting to anybody with a modem. to pay for it they sold the dial-up call itself, which briefly made a gaming website the fourth largest internet provider in the country by call minutes. fl |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Legend Entertainment 📖 1989 - 2004 legend entertainment was started in 1989 by two people who had just watched infocom close, and its whole argument was that the text adventure did not have to die, it only had to grow a picture window and a mouse. that held for about six years. by 1999 the studio was making first person shooters on t |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2004|
|_____|
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Microsoft Train Simulator 📖 2001 - 2004 microsoft train simulator was a june 2001 sim from kuju entertainment in godalming, published by microsoft games studio. six routes across austria and japan and britain and the us, 192k us copies sold by christmas 2001, a million worldwide by 2005. train simulator 2 was cancelled in 2004 when micros |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
The Bitmap Brothers 📖 1987 - 2004 the wapping-based amiga and atari st studio three young british programmers founded in 1987. ran best-selling 16-bit titles through the early 1990s with a recognizable chrome cyberpunk visual style. the playstation generation made their aesthetic obsolete by the late 1990s. the original founders dep |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Cybiko 📖 2000 - 2003 cybiko was a teen-targeted handheld that paired a rubber qwerty keyboard with a 100-meter peer-to-peer radio so kids in the same school hallway could text each other for free. it launched in the us in may 2000, sold around 250 thousand units in its first year, and ran into the dot-com crash and the |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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WonderSwan 📖 1999 - 2003 wonderswan was the last handheld gunpei yokoi worked on before he died in a 1997 car accident. bandai shipped it posthumously in march 1999 at ¥4,800, ran it on one aa battery for around thirty hours, and got squaresoft to bring the original final fantasy remakes to the platform. the device sold abo |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
New World Computing 📖 1984 - 2003 new world computing was the agoura hills studio jon van caneghem set up in 1984. it shipped might and magic 1 in 1986 and heroes of might and magic 1 in 1995. ntn communications bought the studio first, then the 3do company in 1996. the heroes 4 release in march 2002 was the last new world game. 3do |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Silmarils 📖 1987 - 2003 silmarils was two brothers who had been writing games since 1983 on trs-80s and orics, and who turned it into a company in october 1987 in a town east of paris. the ishar trilogy is what the name still means: three first-person role playing games between 1992 and 1994 with a party system that let me |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Black Isle Studios 📖 1996 - 2003 black isle studios was the small interplay division that made the original two fallout games and planescape torment, three of the most-cited western rpgs of the late nineties. the team ran for seven years inside interplay. when interplay ran out of money in 2003, the studio was disbanded and most of |
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| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Compile 📖 1982 - 2003 compile spent the eighties making shoot em ups for the msx and the pc engine, then in 1991 released puyo puyo, which became one of the largest puzzle games in japan. it also spent money considerably faster than it earned any. in february 1998 it borrowed a billion yen from sega against the puyo puyo |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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Mucky Foot Productions 📖 1997 - 2003 there is an illness in two point hospital called mucky feet. it is named for a guildford studio that opened in january 1997 with four people out of bullfrog and closed on 3 november 2003 having shipped exactly three games in six years. urban chaos and startopia both reviewed better than they sold. t |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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SegaNet 📖 2000 - 2003 seganet was sega's bet that a console could be its own internet provider. for a year it worked. phantasy star online ran on low-latency dedicated servers behind a sega-owned dial-up isp. then sega gave up on the dreamcast in early 2001 and seganet's reason to exist went with it. the isp closed in ju |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Motor City Online 📖 2001 - 2003 motor city online was a subscription racing mmo from ea seattle, released on october 29 2001. it had started inside the need for speed series as need for speed: motor city before ea stripped out the single player and rebuilt it as a persistent online world of classic american muscle cars you rebuilt |
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| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Data East 📖 1976 - 2003 data east made arcade games for twenty seven years and is remembered for burgertime and karate champ, which undersells a catalog of about a hundred and fifty titles. in 1980 it built a cabinet that loaded its games off ordinary audio cassettes so an operator could change the game without changing th |
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| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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The 3DO Company 📖 1991 - 2003 the 3do company was trip hawkins's post-ea second act, set up in september 1991 around a licensed console-standard model for the 3do interactive multiplayer. the console launched in 1993 and flopped against the playstation by 1996. the company pivoted to third-party game publishing for the rest of t |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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ZoneJeuX 📖 1999 - 2003 ten point six million euros went into it and it never found a way to pay for itself. launched by a belgacom subsidiary in november 1999, zonejeux was where french speakers went to find a counter-strike server or a game of belote, and by september 2001 it was the sixteenth most visited site in france |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Gremlin Interactive 📖 1984 - 2003 gremlin started above a computer shop in sheffield in 1984 and lasted nineteen years, which almost nobody in the british software business managed. it went from a platform game about the miners' strike to a fully 3d football game on the playstation without ever leaving town. infogrames paid £22.9 mi |
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| RIP |
|1975-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Enix 📖 1975 - 2003 enix started in 1975 as a company that printed real estate classifieds and got into games in 1982 by running a programming contest. the people who won it built dragon quest four years later. for the next seventeen years enix published the largest game series in japan without employing the people who |
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| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Westwood Studios 📖 1985 - 2003 westwood was founded in 1985 in las vegas by brett sperry and louis castle, originally as westwood associates. dune ii in 1992 effectively defined the real-time strategy genre on pc, and command and conquer in 1995 made the studio a household name for a decade of strategy players. ea bought westwood |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Game Boy 📖 1989 - 2003 gunpei yokoi's rule was to take old cheap technology and use it somewhere nobody had thought to put it. the game boy had a worse screen than the lynx and the game gear and outsold both of them by an order of magnitude, because four aa cells lasted thirty hours and a color screen of that generation l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Atari Games 📖 1984 - 2003 when warner cut atari in half in 1984 it sold the home division to jack tramiel and kept the arcade cabinets, and the part it kept was renamed atari games. it spent the next decade making gauntlet and paperboy, and spent a chunk of the same decade in court with nintendo over a lockout chip and a tet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Kakuto Chojin: Back Alley Brutal 📖 2002 - 2003 seven seconds of quranic recitation, lifted off a german sample library cd from 1995, sat underneath the theme music of a character named asad. microsoft's own geopolitical strategist kate edwards flagged it in november 2002 and the game went on sale in north america anyway, on the assumption nobody |
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| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Sir-Tech 📖 1979 - 2003 sir-tech was a family business in ogdensburg, new york that published a dungeon game for the apple ii in 1981 and accidentally set the template for the japanese role playing game. wizardry did well in america and became load-bearing in japan, where it ran as a licensed series for over thirty years w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Pokémon Mini 📖 2001 - 2002 the pokemon mini was the smallest cartridge-based system nintendo ever shipped. seventy grams. a 96 by 64 monochrome lcd. inside the case sat a rumble motor next to a tilt sensor that read shakes, plus an infrared port for six-way multiplayer. it launched in north america on november 16 2001. japan |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Quintet 📖 1989 - 2002 quintet was founded in april 1989 by two people who had left nihon falcom after making ys, and for six years everything it built came out through enix on the super famicom. actraiser, soul blazer, illusion of gaia and terranigma are the run people still talk about, games about restarting a world rat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Psikyo 📖 1992 - 2002 psikyo was ten years of vertically scrolling shooters made in kyoto by people who had left video system after building aero fighters there. the games are short and fast and aimed straight at you, and several of them shuffled the stage order so you could not memorize a run. x-nauts bought the company |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Mobile Adapter GB 📖 2001 - 2002 mobile adapter gb was a cable and a cartridge that let a game boy color or a game boy advance dial out through a japanese mobile phone. it shipped on 27 january 2001 in separate versions, one per network standard, because japan ran several at once and none of them was gsm. twenty-one games supported |
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|1992-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Cryo Interactive 📖 1992 - 2002 cryo was the french studio that decided adventure games should be about places rather than puzzles, and then went and made them with the people who own the actual places. versailles 1685 was co-produced with the national museums and sold half a million copies in europe. the company listed on the nou |
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|1992-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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Presto Studios 📖 1992 - 2002 presto studios incorporated in san diego in july 1992 so that a group of people in their twenties could finish a time travel adventure nobody wanted to publish, and then they published it themselves. the journeyman project ran on pre-rendered quicktime frames off a cd and it worked well enough to ca |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Majestic 📖 2001 - 2002 electronic arts spent around twenty million dollars on a game with almost no screen. it reached you by telephone and by fax, in the middle of an ordinary tuesday, and the conceit was that none of it was a game. eight hundred thousand people signed up for the free pilot and hardly any of them paid fo |
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|1990-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Kalisto Entertainment 📖 1990 - 2002 kalisto was a bordeaux studio started by a nineteen year old in 1990 that ended up listed on the paris stock exchange nine years later, at close to the worst possible moment. it made nightmare creatures and dark earth, employed around 350 people at its peak and went into judicial liquidation in apri |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Loki Entertainment 📖 1998 - 2002 loki was a lawyer's idea: buy the linux rights to windows games and ship them in boxes. scott draeker started it in november 1998 in tustin, california, and over three years it put around twenty commercial titles on linux, starting with civilization: call to power and finishing with postal plus. the |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Bullfrog Productions 📖 1987 - 2001 bullfrog productions invented the god game with populous in 1989 and ran a six-year streak of management sims and strategy titles that nobody has matched since at the same hit rate. ea bought them in 1995 for forty-four million dollars. peter molyneux left two years later to start lionhead. the stud |
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| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Attic Entertainment Software 📖 1990 - 2001 attic was three equal partners in albstadt, a small town in swabia, who spent the nineties turning germany's own tabletop role playing system into computer games. the northlands trilogy is what they are remembered for, and die zeit later put the three titles together at 2.4 million copies sold world |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Mythos Games 📖 1988 - 2001 a publisher that stopped writing checks in april 2001 is what killed mythos games, and the project it stopped paying for was a 3d remake of x-com by the people who had made x-com. julian and nick gollop had been shipping turn-based tactics out of a small british studio since 1988. ufo: enemy unknown |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Myth: The Fallen Lords 📖 1997 - 2001 bungie.net was built to run the multiplayer for a 1997 game about dwarves rolling satchel charges down hills, and it is now the backend for destiny. myth lost its place on it in november 2001, about a year after microsoft bought bungie and pointed the studio at halo. players had already reverse engi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Neo Geo Pocket Color 📖 1999 - 2001 neo geo pocket color was snk's 16-bit color handheld with a microswitched mini-joystick that arcade purists actually liked. it launched in japan in march 1999 at ¥6,800 and undercut game boy color on price. early sales were respectable, the library aged unusually well, and the platform still lost. s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Dynamix 📖 1984 - 2001 ninety-seven people lost their jobs in eugene, oregon on 14 august 2001, less than five months after they shipped tribes 2. dynamix had spent seventeen years there, eleven of them as a sierra studio, building world war one flight simulators and a puzzle game made of cats and conveyor belts. four of |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Mplayer.com 📖 1996 - 2001 mplayer was the leading dial-up multiplayer service in north america between 1996 and 2001. mpath interactive launched it as a paid offering in late 1996 and switched to an ad-supported model in 1997. the gizmo client handled matchmaking and voice chat in one place, with rankings layered on top, whi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Daily Radar 📖 1999 - 2001 daily radar was the imagine media dot-com era entertainment portal, launched october 1999, killed on 1 may 2001. it tried to be an ign peer for male-skew gaming and entertainment news, with editors lifted from pc gamer and next generation. a nintendo lawsuit over unauthorised pokemon content forced |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Indrema 📖 2000 - 2001 indrema was a linux console announced in march 2000 and buried thirteen months later without a single unit reaching a shelf. the l600 was going to cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars, run an amd duron under a geforce 3, record television, and let anyone write games for it without paying ten tho |
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| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Strategic Simulations 📖 1979 - 2001 joel billings started ssi in mountain view in 1979 to sell wargames to people who already played wargames on paper, and computer bismarck shipped for the apple ii in january 1980. in 1987 the company took the advanced dungeons and dragons license off tsr and built the gold box engine, which carried |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Red Orb Entertainment 📖 1997 - 2001 redorb is broderbund with the first six letters read backwards, which tells you roughly how much thought went into separating the games from the schoolroom software. the label opened in novato, california in may 1997 and had riven on shelves five months later. then the learning company bought broder |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Nintendo 64DD 📖 1999 - 2001 nintendo spent four years promising a magnetic disk drive that would bolt under the n64 and give it writable storage plus a dial-up service. it shipped in japan in december 1999, three years late, sold only as part of a randnet subscription, and moved about fifteen thousand units. nine game disks ca |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
GameStorm 📖 1997 - 2001 kesmai had been running graphical multiplayer games since 1987, when air warrior went up on genie and let strangers fly against each other in real time. gamestorm was the company's own service, opened in november 1997 at ten dollars a month for everything on it, which was a direct attack on the per- |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Technosoft 📖 1980 - 2001 technosoft began in 1980 as a microcomputer shop in sasebo, a naval port at the far western end of japan, about as far from the tokyo software industry as you can get and still be in the country. it made thunder force, which is the reason anyone says the name, and it made herzog zwei in 1989, which |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Air Warrior 📖 1987 - 2001 kesmai put air warrior on genie in 1987 and it was one of the first graphical worlds where strangers shared a map in real time. you paid six dollars an hour for a sky with other people in it, and for most of a decade that was the only place you could get one. genie gave way to aol, then to kesmai's |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Online Gaming Review 📖 1995 - 2001 december 1995, and a website about computer games went up at a point when the games press was still almost entirely paper. ogr grew fast enough to spawn its own print magazine and to get bought twice inside two years. strategy plus folded it into cdmag.com as a branded skin in the spring of 1999, an |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Game.com 📖 1997 - 2000 game.com was tiger electronics' attempt to ship a full cartridge handheld with a touchscreen and a stylus, plus a 14.4k modem in the box. it launched in september 1997 at $69 with the pitch that it would be the first handheld you could browse the web on. it sold fewer than three hundred thousand uni |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Heat.net 📖 1997 - 2000 heat.net was segasoft's attempt to build the online layer for pc gaming before sega ever shipped a console online service. it launched in 1997 as a free ad-supported lobby for quake ii and unreal tournament, with built-in chat plus a degrees loyalty currency you could spend at the black market store |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Accolade 📖 1984 - 2000 two atari programmers who had already helped start activision founded accolade in 1984 and spent fifteen years publishing test drive and hardball, plus a blue bobcat nobody wanted. its lasting contribution was legal rather than creative. it reverse engineered the sega genesis lockout, got sued for i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
SegaSoft 📖 1995 - 2000 a 50-50 joint venture between sega and csk, set up in 1995 to sell pc games to americans by a company whose whole identity was arcade hardware. the games were odd and mostly did not sell. what it built instead was heat.net, a multiplayer service with lobbies and friend lists and a scholarship league |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Satellaview 📖 1995 - 2000 the satellaview was a modem-shaped peripheral that clipped under the super famicom and pulled games down from a satellite radio broadcaster. it ran in japan from april 23 1995 to june 30 2000. nintendo never shipped it outside japan. the broadcast was a partnership with the satellite station st.giga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Verant Interactive 📖 1998 - 2000 verant interactive was the studio that actually shipped everquest. it spun out of 989 studios in 1998 with john smedley, brad mcquaid, russell shanks and 55 other ex-989 employees. everquest launched march 16 1999 and became the dominant western mmorpg of its era. sony rolled the company into sony o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Aliens Online 📖 1998 - 2000 aliens online charged ten dollars a month to put you inside the hive. the marines got classes and motion trackers, the aliens got the whole map on radar and a lifecycle that ran from facehugger up to queen, and the queen was another subscriber rather than a script. mythic built it on the magestorm e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Looking Glass Studios 📖 1990 - 2000 looking glass studios was started as blue sky productions in 1990 in salem new hampshire by paul neurath and ned lerner, merged with lerner research in 1992, and ran for ten years out of cambridge massachusetts. across that decade it built ultima underworld, system shock, terra nova, flight unlimite |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Island of Kesmai 📖 1985 - 2000 two university of virginia classmates wrote a six-player dungeon game in the summer of 1980 and spent five years turning it into something an online service could sell. island of kesmai went live on compuserve on 15 december 1985 at six dollars an hour, with room for a hundred people in the same wor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Sega Saturn 📖 1994 - 2000 the saturn won japan and lost everywhere else. 9.26 million units total, more than half of them in japan. its dual-cpu design made every port a nightmare, and the surprise us launch in may 1995 burned the retailer relationships it needed. by 1997 sega was already publicly calling it not the future. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Falcon 4.0 📖 1998 - 2000 microprose shipped falcon 4.0 on december 11 1998 after six years of development at the alameda spectrum holobyte studio. it was the most ambitious civilian f-16 sim ever attempted, with a real dynamic korean peninsula campaign and a 600-page printed manual. the launch was buggy enough that pc gamin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
989 Studios 📖 1995 - 2000 989 studios was sony's american first-party game studio brand on the original playstation. it shipped twisted metal 3 and 4. it also held the syphon filter trilogy and the NFL GameDay sports line. on april 1 2000 sony folded the studio back into SCEA studios to prepare for ps2. the 989 sports brand |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Cavedog Entertainment 📖 1995 - 2000 cavedog entertainment was set up in 1995 inside humongous entertainment as the adult-games division for chris taylor's real-time strategy project. total annihilation shipped in september 1997 and won multiple game-of-the-year nods at PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World, then total annihilation: kingd |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Human Entertainment 📖 1983 - 2000 human spent its first years building famicom games that shipped with nintendo's name on the box and bandai's name on the box, then put its own name on fire pro wrestling in 1989 and kept it there for a decade. in 1990 it opened a school in kichijoji to train game developers, which was an odd thing f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
SingleTrac 📖 1994 - 2000 twisted metal came out for the playstation in 1995 with warhawk beside it, both from a salt lake city studio founded the year before by engineers out of a flight simulator company. sony paid for those games and sony owned them, so when the relationship soured the studio had to build the same games a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Spectrum HoloByte 📖 1983 - 1999 sphere inc founded in boulder colorado in 1983 by jeff sauter with two co-founders, the company merged with nexa in 1987 and rebranded as spectrum holobyte under chairman gilman louie. it shipped the first tetris outside the soviet union in 1988 for ms-dos, then built the falcon series into the cano |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
MUD1 📖 1978 - 1999 roy trubshaw wrote it at the university of essex in 1978 on a pdp-10, and richard bartle finished it over the three years that followed. compuserve sold it to americans as british legends for more than a decade, then retired it in december 1999 while clearing old software off its machines ahead of t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
MegaWars III 📖 1984 - 1999 kesmai put a persistent galaxy on compuserve in january 1984 and ran it in cycles of about a month, each one ending with somebody crowned emperor and the map wiped clean for the next round. a hundred people could be in it at once on a service that billed by the connected hour, which made a month-lon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
TEN (Total Entertainment Network) 📖 1996 - 1999 ten was the first commercial online pc gaming service to go live, in september 1996, a paid dial-in matchmaking and chat platform for quake and command & conquer. battle.net launched a few months later for free with diablo and ate ten's reason to exist. by 1999 ten had pivoted to browser-based card |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Sensible Software 📖 1986 - 1999 sensible software was two men from chelmsford who had been at school together and who spent thirteen years drawing the smallest sprites in europe. sensible world of soccer got 1,500 clubs and 27,000 players onto an amiga floppy in 1994, and stanford later put it on a list of the ten most important g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Sega Nomad 📖 1995 - 1999 a full genesis with a screen attached. october 1995 in north america only. one million units sold, two to three hours of battery on six aa cells, no follow-up model. sega had moved its attention to the saturn and never gave the nomad a second chance. quietly discontinued in 1999. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
American Laser Games 📖 1989 - 1999 robert grebe built shooting simulators for police departments in albuquerque and then pointed the same rig at arcades. mad dog mccree arrived in 1990: a sony laserdisc player and an amiga 500 in a cabinet, running filmed actors in cowboy hats who fell over when you shot them. for five years it was t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Rainbow Arts 📖 1984 - 1999 rainbow arts was the german home computer publisher that got famous twice for the same reason, which was copying american and japanese games closely enough to get letters from lawyers. the great giana sisters in 1987 was super mario on a commodore 64 and nintendo had it off the shelves within months |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands 📖 1996 - 1999 ssi built an advanced dungeons and dragons world for at&t's interchange network, at&t closed the network before the game was finished, and total entertainment network picked it up instead. it went live on 2 october 1996 with almost unrestricted player versus player combat and a peer to peer design t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Exidy 📖 1973 - 1999 april 1976 is the date that matters here. exidy shipped a driving cabinet where the things you ran over screamed and left tombstones on the track, an associated press reporter saw it in a seattle arcade, and within a year the game had been on 60 minutes and in the new york times. the coverage sold c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Simulmondo 📖 1988 - 1999 francesco carlà was a music journalist who wrote a videogame column for an italian computer magazine, and in 1987 he used the column to advertise for italians who wanted to do this for a living. hundreds wrote back. simulmondo came out of that, about 150 games out of bologna, and its one real invent |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
The ImagiNation Network 📖 1991 - 1998 the sierra network launched may 1991 out of oakhurst, california as ken williams's "cyberspace theme park" for sierra on-line. it was a dial-up commercial online service built around games rather than text rooms, with themed lands for flight sims, casino games, fantasy rpgs, and the larryland adult |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Casio Loopy 📖 1995 - 1998 casio loopy was the 32-bit home console casio shipped in japan on october 19 1995, sold as my computer tv for girls. the hook was a built-in thermal color printer that turned game screenshots into stickers. eleven titles total, almost all shojo-coded dating sims and anime tie-ins. the line was quiet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
CyberFlix 📖 1993 - 1998 bill appleton had written world builder and supercard before he started a game studio in knoxville, tennessee on 28 june 1993, which is not where anyone was looking for one. cyberflix built its own engine, called dreamfactory, and used it to make titanic: adventure out of time in 1996. the game was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
GameTek 📖 1987 - 1998 north miami beach is not where anyone goes looking for a video game publisher, and gametek was never quite one. it was a rights holder that had bought the electronic publishing rights to american television game shows and licensed them out, until it noticed the licensee was keeping the money. rare b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Simtex 📖 1988 - 1998 master of orion shipped in 1993, and the magazine preview that covered it invented the phrase 4x to describe what it was doing. simtex sold itself to its own publisher two years later and stopped being a name on a box. the project after that was a superhero tactics game that never shipped, and when |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
PF.Magic 📖 1991 - 1998 pf.magic was started in san francisco in 1991 to build a genesis modem accessory with at&t and sega. at&t did the manufacturing math and walked, taking half the funding with it, and rob fulop went and asked a mall santa what children actually wanted instead. the answer was a puppy. dogz shipped in 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Sega Net Link 📖 1996 - 1998 sega released the net link in the united states in october 1996 at one hundred and ninety-nine dollars, a 28.8k modem that slid into the saturn's cartridge port and turned the console into a web browser and a mail client using software written by planetweb. four games picked up head-to-head modem pl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
ICOM Simulations 📖 1981 - 1998 tod zipnick started the company as tmq software in march 1981 and was dead of hodgkin's disease by 1991, right as its games were landing. icom built the macventure line on the original macintosh, where shadowgate and deja vu turned the adventure game from a typing exercise into something you clicked |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Ocean Software 📖 1983 - 1998 ocean was the manchester software house david ward and jon woods set up in 1983 (first as spectrum games, then renamed when retailers got confused about the spectrum part). its catalog leaned on movie and arcade licenses across the 80s and into the early 90s, robocop, batman, jurassic park, the adda |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
NEC PC-FX 📖 1994 - 1998 the pc-fx was nec's 32-bit console for the japanese home market. it launched on 23 december 1994 with hudson soft as co-developer and a strict anime fmv focus, in a generation where its rivals had made 3d polygons the central feature of the platform pitch. only 62 games shipped for it across its lif |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
DWANGO 📖 1994 - 1998 dwango was a dial-up matchmaking service for the early first-person shooters, built in houston in early 1994 by bob huntley and kee kimbrell, with some client code from john romero at id. you ran its software and it dialed a phone number that dropped you into a text lobby where you could launch a ga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Apple Bandai Pippin 📖 1996 - 1997 the apple bandai pippin was a six-hundred-dollar internet-and-multimedia console with a game library nobody wanted. apple licensed the platform to bandai. the japanese launch happened in march 1996 and the us launch in june 1996. steve jobs canceled the project shortly after returning to apple, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Color Dreams 📖 1989 - 1997 a color dreams cartridge was baby blue instead of nintendo gray, and that was the whole pitch on the outside of the box. dan lawton's company defeated the 10nes lockout chip in 1989 and undercut every licensed publisher on price. when shelves started closing anyway it spun off wisdom tree and sold b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Neverwinter Nights (AOL) 📖 1991 - 1997 ssi had the dungeons and dragons license and a gold box engine that already worked on floppy disk. stormfront pointed the same engine at a server on america online in march 1991 and got the first online role playing game that drew you a picture instead of describing one. it billed by the hour, which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Sega Game Gear 📖 1990 - 1997 the game gear was sega's answer to the nintendo game boy. it launched in japan on october 6 1990 with a backlit color screen at a moment when nintendo was still selling monochrome dot matrix. the hardware specs were better on paper. battery life and price were not, and the device ate six aa batterie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Neo Geo CD 📖 1994 - 1997 snk's home cartridges cost more than the console most families owned, so the answer was to press the same games onto compact discs and sell them for a tenth of the price. the games really were arcade perfect and the discs really were affordable. the machine read them at single speed into a fixed blo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Sega Mega Drive 📖 1988 - 1997 tokyo, 29 october 1988. sega shipped a home console with an arcade processor inside it and sold through the first production run in two days. north america got the same machine as the genesis a year later, and by january 1992 sega held 65 percent of the 16-bit market there, the only time it ever bea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Cyberdreams 📖 1990 - 1997 h.r. giger looked at what a 1992 pc could draw, said it was jagged, and made them throw away two hundred and forty of their two hundred and fifty-six colors to get the resolution up. that was the entire cyberdreams business model: rent a famous name from outside games and build an adventure around i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
3DO Interactive Multiplayer 📖 1993 - 1996 the 3do was the first major console built on a licensed-hardware bet. panasonic, goldstar, sanyo and creative labs all shipped their own boxes against one software library. it launched at $699.99 in october 1993, time named it product of the year, and the math did not work. sony shipped playstation |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Bandai Playdia 📖 1994 - 1996 bandai shipped the playdia in japan on 23 september 1994 at 24,800 yen, an 8-bit cd-rom console aimed at small kids with anime tie-ins. the library was 23 titles across two years, mostly full motion video quiz software with dragon ball z and sailor moon licensing. sales were poor. bandai discontinue |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
ReadySoft 📖 1987 - 1996 readysoft was a canadian conversion house that made its name doing something most people thought was impossible, putting don bluth's laserdisc arcade games onto home computers with a megabyte of memory. the amiga dragon's lair in 1989 was redrawn frame by frame and spread across a box of floppy disk |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
The Shadow of Yserbius 📖 1991 - 1996 the shadow of yserbius was a graphical dungeon crawler that shipped with the sierra network in 1991, built by joe ybarra for sierra on-line. you dialed in, paid by the hour, walked into a mountain and formed a party of four with strangers who were also paying by the hour. it was one of the first onl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Sega Technical Institute 📖 1990 - 1996 mark cerny was twenty five when sega let him open a studio in california whose entire premise was that japanese and american developers should sit in the same room and learn from each other. it produced sonic the hedgehog 2 and comix zone, and it spent six years demonstrating that the two halves wou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1927-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Gottlieb 📖 1927 - 1996 the flipper is a gottlieb invention. humpty dumpty put six of them on a playfield in 1947 and turned a machine you watched into a game you played, which is the single largest change anyone ever made to pinball. the company had already been in chicago for twenty years by then and it stayed for anothe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Nazca Corporation 📖 1994 - 1996 nazca was about thirty people who walked out of irem in 1994 when the arcade division stopped, set up in suita on the edge of osaka, and shipped two games in the same year. one of them was metal slug. snk bought the studio that october, and the company name stopped existing while every person inside |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Atari Jaguar 📖 1993 - 1996 the jaguar was atari's last home console and the last hardware atari corporation ever shipped. it launched at $249.99 in november 1993 with a slogan about being the first sixty-four-bit machine and a controller that had a telephone keypad on it. about one hundred and twenty-five thousand units moved |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Atari Corporation 📖 1984 - 1996 atari corporation was jack tramiel's second act after he walked out of commodore in january 1984. he bought atari inc's consumer division from warner communications in july of that year for a 240 million dollar paper note and ran it for twelve years on a cost-cutting playbook. the atari st sold arou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
U.S. Gold 📖 1984 - 1996 u.s. gold sold american software to british teenagers, and for twelve years that was the entire business. geoff and anne brown started it in birmingham in 1984 and licensed whatever they could get hold of, first from american publishers and later from capcom and sega. the arcade conversions it is re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Sega 32X 📖 1994 - 1996 sega 32x was a $159 cartridge-shaped add-on that bolted on top of the sega genesis. sega launched it in north america on november 21 1994, codenamed project mars, as a stopgap into the 32-bit era while the saturn was still being readied. the saturn launched in japan the same month and stole all of s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Sega CD 📖 1991 - 1996 sega cd was the cd-rom add-on for the genesis. sega launched it in japan in december 1991 and in north america in october 1992 at $299. you stacked it under the console, and you got full motion video games. only about 2.24 million people ever bought one. by january 1996 sega had stopped making them, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Sega CDX 📖 1994 - 1996 sega cdx was a combined genesis and sega cd console that also worked as a portable audio cd player. north america launch was april 1994 at $399.95, about $100 more than the two products bought separately. europe and japan got the same hardware as the multi-mega. it was discontinued in 1996 with the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Technōs Japan 📖 1981 - 1996 technos japan was three data east employees in a one room apartment in 1981 who ended up making double dragon, the game every beat em up after it copied. the president's first name was kunio and he put it on a schoolboy character that went on to carry more than twenty games in japan. what killed the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Digital Pictures 📖 1991 - 1996 a vhs deck with a controller port was the original idea. hasbro paid for it, then killed it, and the people who had built the software bought it back and put it on the sega cd instead. night trap moved two hundred thousand copies in six weeks and then got named in a senate hearing its maker was not |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
FTL Games 📖 1982 - 1996 forty thousand copies in the first year, and doug bell's own estimate that more than half of everyone who owned an atari st eventually bought it. dungeon master in 1987 put a real-time first-person dungeon on a home computer and every game that copied it did better out of the idea than ftl did. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Capstone Software 📖 1984 - 1996 the pinnacle of entertainment was printed under a triangle on every box, which was either a joke nobody at the company got or one they all did. capstone sold licensed tie-ins and doom clones out of miami for twelve years and got to the build engine before 3d realms shipped anything on it. intracorp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Atari Lynx 📖 1989 - 1996 the atari lynx was the first color handheld console. amiga veterans rj mical and dave needle designed it in 1987 at epyx, who licensed manufacturing and marketing to atari after running out of money. atari shipped it in north america on september 1 1989 at $189, with a color backlit screen that beat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Absolute Entertainment 📖 1986 - 1995 the name was picked so the company would sit above activision in a distributor's catalog, which is exactly the trick activision had pulled on atari a decade earlier. it worked for nine years. absolute made cartridges out of other people's characters for other people's publishers, and when the cartri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
TurboGrafx-16 📖 1987 - 1994 the pc engine launched in japan on october 30 1987 and was the first sixteen-bit-class home console to ship. as turbografx-16 in north america from august 1989 it sold poorly against the genesis. nec exited the console business in 1994. global sales sat around 6.6 million base units plus 1.9 million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Thalion Software 📖 1988 - 1994 thalion was eleven people in gütersloh who came out of the atari st demo scene and decided to make the games they had been writing effects for. between october 1988 and the end of 1994 they shipped twenty five titles, and the two that still get argued about are amberstar and ambermoon, german role p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Amiga CD32 📖 1993 - 1994 a warehouse in the philippines is where most of this story ends. commodore built up cd32 inventory there for an american launch that a federal judge blocked, because the company had missed a ten million dollar royalty payment on a patent covering the xor operation. the consoles stayed in the buildin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Toaplan 📖 1979 - 1994 toaplan made arcade shooters in tokyo for about nine years and went bankrupt on the last day of march 1994. the genre it left behind is the reason bullet hell exists, because the people who built those games walked out and founded cave and raizing between them. what the company is actually famous fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
LJN 📖 1967 - 1994 seventy million dollars of licensed toys in 1982, most of it e.t. merchandise and a brooke shields doll. by 1987 the same licensing habit was pointed at the nintendo entertainment system, and jack friedman's company put its rainbow on jaws and on four wwf carts. acclaim bought the whole thing in 199 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Epyx 📖 1978 - 1993 epyx began in 1978 as automated simulations, two people selling dungeon crawls in ziploc bags, and by 1984 it was the studio that made the commodore 64 look like a sports console. the games series sold in the millions on one idea, a stack of short events and four people taking turns at the same keyb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Dinamic Software 📖 1984 - 1992 dinamic was three brothers in madrid who turned a bedroom operation into the biggest name in spanish software, and for most of the 1980s spain had a games industry largely because dinamic and erbe were in it. the games were punishingly hard and the covers were painted by people selling a fantasy the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Windows Reversi 📖 1985 - 1992 the only game in windows 1.0, written in 1984 by a member of the windows team as a test of whether anyone could build an application for the thing at all. it sat on the disc through windows 2 and windows 3.0 with almost nothing changed. windows 3.1 dropped it for minesweeper and no one appears to ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Mirrorsoft 📖 1983 - 1992 mirrorsoft was a newspaper company's games division, which sounds harmless until you remember whose newspaper. it published tetris across europe on a license chain so loose that nobody could say what it actually covered, and in february 1989 kevin maxwell flew to moscow to find out and came back wit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Magnetic Scrolls 📖 1984 - 1992 magnetic scrolls was the only british studio anyone put next to infocom, and for about six years the comparison was not flattery. it wrote each game once and shipped it on something like thirteen machines, by building its own virtual machine years before that was a normal thing to do. then the marke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Opera Soft 📖 1986 - 1992 madrid, 1986. five people walked out of indescomp and took an office near the ópera district because the rent beat the one they had looked at in lavapiés, which is how the company got its name. opera soft turned out to be one of the two or three houses that made the spanish golden age of software wo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Distinctive Software 📖 1982 - 1991 distinctive software was a work-for-hire studio in burnaby, british columbia, started in 1982 by two teenagers who had just sold their first game. for most of the eighties it made driving games for other people's logos, test drive for accolade and stunts with its track editor being the two that outl |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Palace Software 📖 1984 - 1991 palace software was a film company's games label. palace pictures distributed video in london and held the uk rights to the evil dead, so the first game was the evil dead. what the label is actually remembered for is cauldron in 1985 and barbarian in 1987, a sword fighting game with a decapitation i |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Game & Watch 📖 1980 - 1991 a bullet train in the late seventies, and a nintendo engineer watching a bored businessman kill time with an lcd calculator. gunpei yokoi built a toy out of the same cheap parts: one game on one screen, with a clock in the corner so an adult could carry it without embarrassment. 43.4 million sold ac |
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| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Cinemaware 📖 1986 - 1991 cinemaware was a small studio that built "interactive movie" games for the amiga starting in 1986. defender of the crown shipped at launch and is the title most people remember the studio by. the company burned cash porting every release to every platform it could find. by '91 it was over a million |
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| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Level 9 Computing 📖 1981 - 1991 high wycombe first, then somewhere in the west country, is where three brothers wrote the text adventures britain measured against infocom. the trick was a-code, an interpreter of their own that squeezed the prose by half so an entire game could sit in memory after a single cassette load. they annou |
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| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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CRL Group 📖 1982 - 1991 the british board of film classification had never classified a video game until crl sent it dracula in 1986, and the board came back with a 15 certificate. jack the ripper got the first 18 a year later. clement chambers had registered the company in april 1982, at eighteen, as computer rentals limi |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Hewson Consultants 📖 1980 - 1991 a german distributor booked a london hotel suite in 1991 to tell andrew hewson that he could not pay his bills and was going under. that one meeting finished a british publisher which had spent a decade taking cassettes off bedroom programmers and turning them into some of the best-reviewed games on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1991|
|_____|
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Personal Software Services 📖 1981 - 1991 to launch the nuclear weapons in theatre europe you had to put down the joystick and pick up a telephone. a number printed with the game played you a recording of air-raid sirens and crying and then read out a code word, midnight sun, which unlocked the chemical and nuclear options. boots and john m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1990|
|_____|
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Quicksilva 📖 1980 - 1990 quicksilva was a mail order operation in southampton that turned into one of the largest software publishers in britain before there was really an industry to be largest in. it published what teenagers posted to it, put proper artwork on the cassette inlays, and had time-gate at the top of the spect |
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| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1990|
|_____|
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Intellivision 📖 1979 - 1990 mattel electronics lost 394 million dollars in 1983 and was sold off for 20 million on 4 february 1984, which killed the division but not the console. a group led by a former mattel executive kept the intellivision on sale for six more years, mostly by mail order, and added twenty one games to the l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1989|
|_____|
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Infocom 📖 1979 - 1989 twenty six people were left in the cambridge office on the day the lights went off. infocom had sold around two million games made entirely of sentences, then spent its last three years owned by a company that wanted a database business more than it wanted zork. the interpreter it built to ship thos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Ultimate Play the Game 📖 1982 - 1988 ashby-de-la-zouch is a small town in leicestershire, and for four years it held the most feared software house in britain. tim and chris stamper built ultimate out of a house next to the family newsagent. jetpac cleared 300,000 copies in 1983 and knight lore made every other spectrum game look a dec |
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| RIP |
|1932-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Coleco Industries 📖 1932 - 1988 coleco started in 1932 as the connecticut leather company, founded in hartford by maurice greenberg to supply shoe-repair shops. it spent the post-war decades pivoting into above-ground swimming pools, then into early dedicated video game consoles. the telstar console hit in 1976, the colecovision i |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1988|
|_____|
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PlayNET 📖 1984 - 1988 two engineers out of ge research put a graphical online service on the commodore 64 in 1984, years before anybody else made a home computer draw its own network. chess against a stranger at 300 baud, with a message system they called on line messages. then they licensed the whole thing to control vi |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Datasoft 📖 1980 - 1988 june 1980, chatsworth california, and for seven years datasoft did the unglamorous work of the eight-bit era: port the arcade hit, buy the movie license. bruce lee in 1984 is the one people still talk about. the money stopped in 1987 and two executives bought the name out of the bankruptcy so the ca |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1987|
|_____|
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Super Cassette Vision 📖 1984 - 1987 seventy percent of the japanese home console market belonged to a toy company in 1982, and the toy company was epoch. the cassette vision had sold around 400,000 units and epoch took a full year to answer the famicom with a successor, which arrived on 17 july 1984 at 14,800 yen and sold roughly 300, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Imagic 📖 1981 - 1986 imagic was started on 1 june 1981 in los gatos by people who had just walked out of atari and mattel, and for about eighteen months it was the best third party cartridge house in america. demon attack and atlantis were better than most of what the console makers were shipping themselves. the company |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Acornsoft 📖 1980 - 1986 acornsoft was the software arm of a british computer company that mostly wanted to sell computers. for about five years it shipped the games and the serious software for the bbc micro out of the same office, which is a range no publisher has now. one of those games was elite, and elite is the only r |
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| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1985|
|_____|
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Adventure International 📖 1978 - 1985 scott adams played colossal cave on a mainframe, was told a machine with sixteen kilobytes could not possibly run something like it, and then wrote adventureland on a trs-80 anyway. the company he and alexis adams built around it was the first outfit selling games for home computers as a business. b |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1985|
|_____|
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Sega SG-1000 📖 1983 - 1985 on 15 july 1983 two japanese companies put a home console on sale, and only one of them is remembered for it. sega's sg-1000 cost 15,000 yen and ran a z80 behind parts anyone could order from a catalog. sega expected to move 50,000 units in the first year and moved 160,000, partly because nintendo h |
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| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1985|
|_____|
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Bally Astrocade 📖 1978 - 1985 $299 in april 1978 bought a games console with better graphics hardware than anything else in an american living room, and a promise attached to it. the keyboard add-under that would turn the bally professional arcade into a real computer was announced and respecified for years, and never shipped. b |
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| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1985|
|_____|
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Synapse Software 📖 1981 - 1985 by early 1984 it was the largest outside supplier of software for atari's 8-bit computers, and two thirds of its money was already coming from commodore machines instead. then it bet the company on a line of home productivity applications, shipped forty thousand units into a deal with atari, and jac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1985|
|_____|
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Muse Software 📖 1978 - 1985 baltimore, on the corner of charles and mulberry, where a software company ran a computer store on the ground floor and wrote apple II games upstairs. muse made two million dollars a year at its peak and was down to six employees when it filed chapter 7 in 1985. the name it owned went on to be worth |
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| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1984|
|_____|
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Cassette Vision 📖 1981 - 1984 the processor was not in the console. it was in the cartridge, a fresh one in every game you bought, because the team that designed the machine could not get the chip out of the cartridge and into the box. that made the console cheap at 13,500 yen and the games dear at 4,000, and it worked anyway: f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
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Imagine Software 📖 1982 - 1984 imagine lasted twenty two months. two men who had walked out of bug-byte registered it in liverpool in september 1982, and it sold cassettes fast enough to become the loudest software name in britain before it had learned to file a vat return. the money went on company cars and a motorcycle racing t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
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Vectrex 📖 1982 - 1984 thirty one point six million dollars is what milton bradley had lost on it by february 1984, having bought the company that made it barely a year earlier. the vectrex arrived in october 1982 at $199 with a monochrome vector monitor built into the cabinet, so it never needed a television, and every g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
PlayCable 📖 1980 - 1984 mattel and general instrument put a pdp-11 at the cable company and broadcast intellivision games down the tv wire as an fm signal. an adapter in the cartridge slot caught them and held 8k, so you got twenty titles rotating every month for a monthly fee and owned nothing. it reached thirteen cities |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Casio PV-1000 📖 1983 - 1984 two cartridge numbers were assigned and never used, gpa-108 and gpa-113, and that gap is the clearest surviving record of what happened here. casio put the pv-1000 on sale in october 1983 at 14,800 yen against the famicom, alongside a separate and deliberately incompatible computer called the pv-200 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Starpath 📖 1981 - 1984 a cassette player, the kind already sitting in every american living room, wired into an atari 2600 through the headphone jack. that was the whole idea. the supercharger gave the console forty-nine times its own memory and about a dozen games that could use it, and then the market it was built for s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Sirius Software 📖 1980 - 1984 eighteen million dollars in unpaid royalties is the figure usually quoted, and sirius never saw any of it. in 1983 this was the fifteenth largest microcomputer software company in the world. a year later it was gone, because the publisher it built atari cartridges for walked away from its own games |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Xonox 📖 1983 - 1984 k-tel sold compilation records off late-night television commercials, and in 1983 it decided the same instinct would work on atari cartridges. the xonox idea was a plug at each end of the shell, two games in one piece of plastic, priced like everybody else's single game. the crash took the category |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
American Multiple Industries 📖 1982 - 1983 $49.95 in 1982 money bought you a sealed atari 2600 cartridge with not for sale to minors printed on the box. american multiple industries traded as mystique and put out three of those under a licensed adult film brand called swedish erotica, all of them programmed by one man. custer's revenge sold |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
Fairchild Channel F 📖 1976 - 1983 jerry lawson led the team that put a slot on the front of a games machine in november 1976, and every console since has had one. the channel f sold around 350,000 units at $169.95 before fairchild walked out of the video game business in april 1979 and handed the design to zircon international, who |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1982|
|_____|
|
Bandai Super Vision 8000 📖 1979 - 1982 seven games were ever made for it, and all seven came out in 1979, the year it went on sale. bandai had put a real processor inside a japanese home console before anyone else and priced it at 59,800 yen. nothing further was ever commissioned. it stayed on the list until 1982, when bandai took the ja |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 1978|
|_____|
|
Kee Games 📖 1973 - 1978 joe keenan was nolan bushnell's friend and neighbor, and in september 1973 he fronted a company that pretended to be atari's rival. kee games advertised itself as a competitor and claimed it was hiring defectors from atari, while quietly selling distributors renamed atari cabinets that made exclusiv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1977|
|_____|
|
Nutting Associates 📖 1967 - 1977 in 1971 a young engineer named nolan bushnell talked a coin-op quiz machine company into manufacturing computer space, and about 1,500 cabinets went out as the first commercially sold video game in history. bill nutting had founded the firm in mountain view to market a trivia box whose rights he bou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1975|
|_____|
|
Magnavox Odyssey 📖 1972 - 1975 ralph baer had the idea in august 1966 while waiting for a bus, and sanders associates, a military electronics contractor, let him build seven prototypes before magnavox agreed to manufacture the last one. what shipped in september 1972 for ninety nine dollars and ninety five cents had no processor |