Earth & Beyond

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

~ the goodbye ~

in 2002 i was starting computer engineering at university in ankara on a ttnet adsl line that had finally replaced our 56k modem at home. earth and beyond was on the other side of an ocean behind a credit-card subscription. it was an mmo set in the year 2575 built for north american players who paid thirteen dollars a month. that economy was not mine.

westwood studios shipped it on september 24, 2002. the studio behind command & conquer had spent five years building a science-fiction sandbox they hoped would compete with everquest. metacritic averaged 82 with mostly favorable press notices, but the subscriber base was thin from the first month onward.

electronic arts closed westwood in march 2004, folding the team into ea pacific. earth and beyond's servers stayed up for another six months, then ea shut them down on september 22, 2004. one game shipped, no expansions, the studio that built it gone before its game.

a small private-server project called net-7 has kept the game running unofficially since the late 2000s. the emulator runs the original client off a re-implemented server stack, and the community is small but persistent enough that westwood-veteran writeups still appear in mmo retrospectives twenty years on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

westwood started development on what became earth and beyond in 1997. the studio had built its reputation on real-time strategy and was reaching for an mmo because everyone in 1997 thought mmos were the next thing. the development cycle stretched through the everquest era and into the early world-of-warcraft preamble, and the game shipped just barely in front of the wow announcement.

the design was conservative for an mmo of its era. you picked one of three races, leveled to 150 in one of three professions, and ran missions through a starfield. nothing was wildly ambitious for 2002. that is part of why the launch reviews were favorable.

~ what really happened ~

electronic arts had bought westwood in 1998. by 2003 the parent company was treating its licensed-ip catalog as the only thing worth funding, and an original-ip mmo with a flat subscriber graph was not interesting. ea shuttered westwood pacific in march 2004 and pulled the remaining staff into other projects. the question of what to do with earth and beyond's running service was answered the cheap way.

on september 22, 2004 ea closed the servers. the official reason was disappointing subscription numbers. there was no graceful wind-down or final event built into the game. two years and three days after launch, an mmo built over five years went dark.

~ the long tail ~

net-7 has kept earth and beyond running for the players who never quite let go. the emulator runs the original client against a re-implemented server stack, and the community is small but stable enough that westwood-veteran writeups still appear in mmo retrospectives. the official servers are dead and the studio went with them, while a tiny group of fans still logs into the year 2575 on a private server.

earth and beyond's place in mmo history is mostly as an example of how electronic arts treated original-ip mmos in the early 2000s. the genre was supposed to be a guaranteed line of recurring revenue. when an mmo missed its first-year subscriber number, the publisher killed it cleanly and quickly.

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