Darkspore

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

~ the eulogy ~

There are hard drives out there with a complete copy of Darkspore on them. Every file is intact and the installer still runs. The game will not start. It reaches for a server that Electronic Arts switched off on 1 march 2016, and nothing answers, so it stops there. No patch fixes this, because nothing is broken.

Maxis Emeryville built it as the studio's first project after Will Wright walked away from the company. About forty people worked on it, veterans mixed with freelancers, and they went reading the Spore forums to work out what the audience actually wanted from the creature technology. The answer they landed on was squads of three heroes, swapped mid-fight, each one assembled out of parts you collected along the way. Maxis hired Paul Sottosanti away from Wizards of the Coast because the early design owed more to trading card games than to anything Maxis had shipped before.

It arrived on 26 april 2011 in north america and two days later in europe, Windows only, and reviewers gave it a 65 average. The complaint underneath most of the reviews was not about the combat. It was that a game with a single player campaign required a product key, an EA account, and a broadband connection that stayed up the whole time you were playing. In june 2013 the login servers failed for long enough that players assumed the game had been abandoned, and it vanished from Steam briefly before the errors were cleared and the listing came back. The real notice went out in december 2015: servers retiring on 1 march.

In 2011 I was twenty seven and doing engineering work in Ankara, and this game never came near me. The distance worth naming is older than that anyway. For the first decade I was online in Turkey, software was a thing you had. It came on a disc or it came down a 33.6k modem across a long afternoon, and once it was on the drive it belonged to you in the flat sense that nobody could reach in and remove it. Darkspore is where that stopped being true for something with a price tag on it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the machine underneath ~

The Hero Editor was the good part and everybody said so. It took the Spore Creature Creator and extended it into thousands of collectible pieces, with DNA as the currency you spent on them. You pulled DNA off dead enemies and out of destroyed scenery, or you sold equipment you did not want. Everything from limbs to armor to color was in play, so two players running the same class rarely ended up looking alike.

The fiction around it was better than it needed to be. The Crogenitors were a scientific civilization that engineered living weapons for their own armies, and one of them, Xylan, was exiled for negligence. He injected himself with the unstable accelerant they had all been experimenting with and came back as the Corruptor. The mutation spread. You played a surviving Crogenitor cleaning up an infection your own people had released. That is a story about a technology that got away from the people who built it, which reads differently now that the game is a dead client.

~ the always-on part ~

Two credentials and a heartbeat stood between you and the main menu. A valid product key with a logged-in EA account, then a connection held open for as long as you played. The last one applied whether or not another human being was involved. Darkspore was co-op first, so a server made sense for the multiplayer half. Nobody has ever produced a technical reason why a solo campaign needed one.

EA had been here already. Spore itself shipped in 2008 with activation-limited copy protection that turned its own store page into a protest board, and SimCity did the same trick again in 2013 with a launch nobody could log into. Darkspore sits in the middle of those two, which is the part that stings: the company was told in public, twice, at high volume, and the architecture did not change. The difference is that Spore and SimCity were eventually patched to run offline. Darkspore never was.

~ what the shutdown proved ~

On 1 march 2016 the game became unplayable everywhere at once. Not degraded, not multiplayer-only. Unplayable. There was no offline patch and no source release, and nothing at all was offered to the people holding licenses. The Lost Media Wiki carries Darkspore under inaccessible media, which is an unusual place for a commercially published title from a company that still exists.

People have tried to bring it back. The obstacle they hit is that the client looks for a bootstrap domain before it does anything else, and that domain went with the rest of it, so reviving the game means rebuilding a service from the outside with no documentation. A free-to-play death leaves nothing to argue about, since nobody paid. Darkspore had a shelf price and a box. Four years and ten months after release, the thing on the receipt stopped existing while still occupying space on the drive, and that gap between what you own and what you can open is the whole inheritance.

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