Earthrise

~ the eulogy ~

Earthrise came out of Sofia, from a Bulgarian studio called Masthead that had been building it for years before anyone outside the country had heard of either. It was a subscription MMO set after a nuclear war, in a place where the survivors had rebuilt into something totalitarian and the factions fought over what was left. No character classes. You learned skills instead of picking one, and you lost the gear you had built whenever somebody else killed you.

That is a specific and demanding design, and the people who want it want it badly. Open-world PvP with real loss, plus a crafting economy run by players rather than by vendors. It was chasing the space that EVE Online holds and that Ultima Online used to hold, which is a small audience but a loyal one.

It went on sale on 4 February 2011 and the reviews arrived within two weeks. MMORPG.com gave it 5.5 out of 10 and used the words bland and uninspired. GameFront gave it 65 and liked the art while saying the progression was slow and there was nobody around to play with. Almost none of the complaints were about the design. They were about bugs and about systems that had clearly gone out unfinished.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a year bought ~

Masthead spent 2011 patching. A free-to-play conversion was announced as the fix, because that was the standard 2011 answer for an MMO that had launched thin, and it never shipped. Every month the subscriber count went the wrong way and the studio was funding a live service off a playerbase that had mostly refunded or drifted.

By the start of 2012 internal testing had produced a number. Four more months of work to get the game to where it should have been at launch. The studio did not have four months of money.

~ the announcement ~

On 9 February 2012 Masthead closed the servers and said, in plain language that studios almost never use, that Earthrise had been released too early and had not met the expectations of its fans. No wind-down period and no farewell event. It went off on the day it was announced, five days after the first anniversary of launch.

~ the second life that never started ~

In May 2012 a German company called Silent Future picked up the game and announced a rebuild under the name Earthrise: First Impact. It was going to be free-to-play and properly balanced, and it was going to arrive reasonably soon. It never arrived. The project was quietly abandoned and the name went back to being an entry in a list of MMOs that lasted a year.

Bulgaria had a real games industry by 2011 and Masthead was one of the few studios there attempting something at this scale rather than doing work-for-hire. The lesson everyone took from it was that the design had been too ambitious for a small team. The record says something duller. Masthead ran out of runway four months before it ran out of bugs, and four months of payroll is a financing problem rather than a creative one.

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