The Tower of Druaga: the Phantom of GILGAMESH

» see druaga-mmo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Namco put The Tower of Druaga in arcades in 1984, and it turned into one of those games Japanese players solved collectively, because the treasure on each floor only appeared if you did some undocumented thing first. Twenty-four years later it came back as a free-to-play MMORPG, built by Q Entertainment and launched on 1 April 2008 as half of a cross-media project with a television anime. The original designer, Masanobu Endo, supervised it and played it, logging in on a character that carried his own name with a star after it.

The tower was the clever part. Out in the world it behaved like any other MMORPG of its generation, but the tower itself was instanced, so once your party stepped inside nobody else existed in there. Each floor forced your party's level to exactly twice the floor number, which meant the first floor made you level two and your expensive gear stopped working. How high you could climb was set by the lowest-level player you brought with you.

Operations moved around underneath it. Rosso Index ran the game until the spring of 2012 and then handed the whole catalog to Willow Entertainment in a corporate split. In September 2013 the company asked players to suggest a new subtitle, and on 10 October, at one of its own in-game holidays, it announced the game would carry the name the Phantom of GILGAMESH from that day on. The company's other MMORPG, Pandora Saga, was licensed out as far as Taiwan and the United States. No equivalent overseas release is recorded for this one.

~ the case file ~

~ the boss who was not there ~

Because the level cap sat well below what the upper floors demanded, the top of the tower was out of reach. So was Druaga. For most of its existence this was a game named after a monster that the game did not contain, in a building you could not finish climbing.

They did mean to fix it. On 9 July 2014 the operators announced that the cap would go to level 120 during August and that Druaga would be implemented. Neither happened. What followed was eighteen months of small updates, mostly new items and refreshed gacha lineups, which is the maintenance rhythm of a game nobody is going to invest in again. A seventh-anniversary medal event that started in April 2015 had its deadline pushed back several times before the operators gave up and declared the extension indefinite.

~ the rip-off store ~

Endo treated the thing as a toy he still owned. In July 2008 he opened an in-game shop selling deliberately overpriced goods, named with a Japanese word for being fleeced. In January 2013 he added a bus on the same principle, which would teleport you between more destinations than the standard service and charged more for it, with a season ticket available. In September 2012 the tower in the game world abruptly changed shape and became his player character.

The calendar was his too. The tenth of every month was Tower Day and carried some bonus, and from 2012 the tenth of October was promoted to Super Tower Day, which is the kind of joke that only works if the people running the game are enjoying themselves. When the Succubus dungeon shipped late and then had to be closed for months over bugs, the response was to put staff into the game from October 2009 to argue with players directly in something they called the Tower of Druaga debating society.

~ the last climb ~

On 20 January 2016 the level cap finally moved to 120. On 27 January the top floor was opened and Druaga was put in it, seven years and nine months after the game went live. Players went up and killed him on 13 March. Three days after that, on 16 March, the operators announced that the game would stop on the last day of March.

It went dark at midnight on 1 April 2016, eight years to the day from launch, and no reason was ever given. Read in order, the last ten weeks look less like a shutdown than a tidying-up: somebody decided that a game called The Tower of Druaga should not be switched off with the tower unclimbable and Druaga never once fought. They added the ending, then waited for somebody to reach it before closing the servers. The domain went to a parking service inside six months, and by that September druaga-mmo.com was serving sponsored listings under a notice explaining that the domain owner had no relationship with the advertisers.

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