Crazyracing AirRider

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

~ the eulogy ~

Nexon put the official AirRider site up on 25 May 2009, ran a closed test in early June and a second one in July, then opened the beta to everybody on 21 July. The last content update landed on 21 October 2009. Between those two dates sits the entire working life of the game. Everything after them is a server bill.

It came out of Rodumani Studio, the Nexon team behind Crazy Arcade and Crazyracing KartRider, and it was sold as the next one. KartRider had grown from a casual kart racer into a Korean national fixture with a player base that reached a serious fraction of the country. AirRider took the same cartoon roster off the ground and kept the item throwing, with flight where the drifting used to be.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was supposed to be ~

A sequel from that studio should have inherited KartRider's audience on name recognition alone. What it inherited instead was the shape. Drifting a kart through a corner is a skill you can feel yourself getting better at, and the whole game is built around that one gesture. Flying handed players an extra axis to be clumsy on, and the courses never gave them a reason to master it.

None of this reached me. Korea's free-to-play boom was covered well in the trade press I was reading as an engineering student, but playing any of it needed a Korean account and a reason to want one, and at twenty-five in Ankara I had neither.

~ the silence ~

Three months after open beta the patches stopped. Korean players date the last update to 21 October 2009, and nothing of substance arrived across the following twenty-six months. The game stayed online and kept accepting logins the whole time. In 2012 the in-game shop changed, which some players read as a sign of life, and it turned out to be housekeeping ahead of the end.

~ twelve january ~

Service ended on 12 January 2012, with falling concurrent users given as the cause. By that point the cause was a restatement rather than a diagnosis. This was the first of the Crazyracing line to go. The original KartRider outlasted it by eleven years in Korea, and when Nexon finally closed that one it was replaced by KartRider: Drift, which is now also a grave.

airrider.nexon.com still answers 200. What it serves is Nexon Korea's main portal, complete with the game list and a login box, and there is nothing on it about the game the subdomain is named after.

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