Empire of Sports

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

~ the obituary ~

Between 18 May and 6 June 2009, while the real Roland-Garros was being played in Paris, the French Tennis Federation licensed its tournament to an online game so that people could play a virtual version of it in the same weeks. That was Empire of Sports, and the arrangement came back every year through 2012. It is the most official thing a game this size ever got its hands on.

F4 was a French studio working an idea that reads as obvious now and did not then. Put role-playing character progression underneath sports, and run the result as one persistent world where players from different countries meet each other live. You made an avatar whose physical attributes improved by competing. Football, tennis, skiing, basketball, athletics and bobsleigh were the competitive disciplines, and other activities like dance and shooting existed purely to train the body you would compete with.

It was free to download with an item shop, no subscription, level cap 100. It was demoed at the Leipzig Games Convention in August 2007 and then spent a long stretch in what F4 called the Prologue, which was an open beta with a better name on it. Full release landed in 2009. It shipped in four languages.

~ the case file ~

~ what the licensing bought ~

What Empire of Sports spent its money on was legitimacy. Justine Henin and her coach Carlos Rodriguez had virtual doubles walking around in it, and so did Joakim Noah and Ian Rush. You could visit an FC Barcelona fan club or stand in a clubhouse licensed from the international bobsleigh federation, and there was a virtual shop branded by L'Equipe.

L'Equipe went further than a shop. The game's two flagship competitions were the L'Equipe Football Tour and the L'Equipe Tennis Tour, the second of which closed each season with a masters event for the year's best players. The Kangaroo Open ran in 2009 against the Australian Open, and a virtual alpine skiing world championship ran the same year, timed to the real one.

~ five years of nothing ~

The French Wikipedia article puts the last update in 2011. If that is right, Empire of Sports spent its final five years on servers nobody was patching, which is a long time for a free-to-play game with an item shop to stay open without anyone tending it.

The website went unreachable several days before the shutdown, which tells you the order the lights went out in. On 21 April 2016 F4 announced the end of operations, and the servers came off.

~ the door notice ~

The notice they put up is still there in 2026, a decade on, served from empireofsports.com as a single page with the game's logo behind it. It is written twice, once in French and once in English:

"The balls, rackets and skis now are silent: it is the time to close the Empire of Sports doors. The servers are now permanently closed and it is not possible to join them anymore. We sincerely want to thank our millions of players all around the world through which we had some unforgettable moments, whether victories or defeats."

Millions is a marketing number and this game never had millions on at once. The rest of it is accurate enough. I never had an account. In 2007 the sports games in my orbit were the ones running on a console or on an internet cafe machine, and a European sports world you downloaded to a home PC was not going to reach Ankara without a Turkish publisher behind it, which it never had.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »