Cosmic Rift

» see cosmicrift.station.sony.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

One programmer wrote two versions of the same idea. The first was abandoned by its publisher in 1998 and is still running tonight on servers nobody is paid to maintain. The second had a real company behind it, with an account system and eleven years of official support, and it has been switched off since 2012. That is the whole grave, and the ordering is the interesting part.

Jeff Petersen built SubSpace at Virgin Interactive, released in December 1997 for a one-off price with no monthly fee, at a moment when almost nothing else was doing large-scale real-time multiplayer over the internet. Virgin's game division collapsed the following year. The server software had shipped inside the box, so the players simply ran their own, and the community has been hosting itself ever since.

Petersen went to Sony, and Cosmic Rift is what he made there. It arrived on 17 April 2001, overhead view again, thirteen ships with their own weapons and handling, dropped into zones that each ran by different rules. The physics were the draw. You carried momentum and had to fight it, so shooting well meant understanding where you were about to be rather than where you were pointing.

None of this reached me. In 2001 I was in internet cafes playing whatever the operator had installed, and an American service with a monthly charge behind a credit card was not something a student in Turkey could sign up for even having heard of it. I found Cosmic Rift the way most people outside the United States found it, which is afterwards, reading about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it lasted ~

The open beta ran free from April 2001 until May 2002, thirteen months of not charging anyone, and then the fee arrived. It sat inside Station Pass next to Infantry and Tanarus, so for most of its life the accurate description is that people already paying Sony for something else got it thrown in. In June 2007, after the station.com rebuild, the whole set went free outright.

That is how a game with a small population stays online for eleven years. It was not popular and it was not expensive. It ran on hardware Sony already owned and took almost no support, and it never grew large enough for anyone to notice it was still there.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 29 February 2012 Sony emailed its players that four titles would close at the end of March. Cosmic Rift went out alongside Infantry, with Star Chamber and EverQuest Online Adventures in the same message. Prepaid time was refunded. The statement said development resources would be better spent on newer games, which is accurate and also says nothing, because there were no development resources on Cosmic Rift to move anywhere.

The servers went off on 29 March 2012. There was no server binary in anybody's box and no protocol documentation, because unlike SubSpace this one had been built as a service from the first day. When Sony switched it off the game did not become abandonware. It became nothing.

~ the fork that lived ~

SubSpace went onto Steam in 2016 as Continuum, free, put there by the people who had reverse-engineered it, and it has had players every single year since the official servers vanished in 1998. Nearly three decades of continuous play for a game whose publisher went bankrupt, against eleven for the properly funded one with an owner.

The difference is not quality and it is not luck. SubSpace shipped the server. Cosmic Rift did not, and a game that cannot be hosted by its own players has exactly one life, which ends whenever the company holding it decides the line item is not worth the attention.

~ the long tail ~

Petersen's two attempts sit on opposite sides of that argument, which is the reason for putting them next to each other. The one made under a publisher that failed survived. The one made under a publisher that succeeded did not.

cosmicrift.com is a parked page with a price on it, currently a little under thirteen thousand dollars. That is the last remaining asset. A domain somebody will eventually buy for something unrelated, and eleven years of a small crowd who knew each other's names, with nothing left to point at.

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