City of Heroes

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

~ the obit ~

city of heroes was the kind of mmo i was not playing in the early 2000s, a north america coded subscription title at fifteen us dollars a month. i was on counter-strike at internet cafes and on ultima online private servers in the late dial-up window when this game launched. paragon city stayed in my peripheral vision as something american fans got loud about whenever shutdown rumors started.

cryptic studios released it on april 28, 2004 in north america. the hook was the character creator. you could spend an hour in the front-end alone, every cape variant and every glove pattern handled in detail, and then enter a superhero version of an open city where the npc dialog sometimes called you by your hero name. peak subscriber count came in september 2008 at about 125 thousand, which was small relative to wow but huge for a non-fantasy mmo.

ncsoft announced shutdown on august 31, 2012, citing a "realignment of company focus and publishing support". paragon studios, the in-house team, was dissolved. the game went dark on november 30, 2012. fans organized rallies in real cities. there were petition drives and an attempted community buyout that ncsoft refused. for seven years the only city of heroes content was old screenshots and youtube fan tributes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the actual end ~

the standard mmo death pattern at the time was subscriber decline followed by a free-to-play conversion. city of heroes did not get the conversion. ncsoft chose to close paragon studios outright instead of restructuring it. the financial argument was that the game was profitable but not as profitable as ncsoft's korean-developed titles, and the company wanted to consolidate. the public reasoning never really matched the public mood.

~ the second life ~

in april 2019 a private server's source code leaked. for years a small group of former players had been running an unauthorized copy of the game internally without telling anyone, and once that leaked, public emulator-style servers sprang up almost immediately. ncsoft tolerated them quietly. in january 2024 the company signed an actual license with one of the fan operators, homecoming servers, allowing the game to run free of charge with player donations as the funding model. it is one of very few mmos to come back from a hard shutdown with the publisher's blessing.

~ the cape ~

the bigger cultural fact is the costume editor. city of heroes spent more design effort on character appearance than on the world itself, and that decision held up. people who never played the game spent hours in trial accounts just building heroes. fan archives still circulate compilations of pre-shutdown costumes. the game was about being seen by other players in a public space wearing something you made, and that loop turned out to be the part most worth saving.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »