Extrasolar

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

~ the eulogy ~

Extrasolar handed you a rover on a planet called Epsilon Prime and one real decision to make with it. You picked a spot on the map, set the camera angle, and then you left. The photograph came back hours later, rendered somewhere else and delivered to you finished, and whatever happened to be standing in the frame when the shutter went was what you got. Lazy 8 Studios opened the service on 17 February 2014. The Verge wrote it up the following day, which is why most accounts give the 18th.

The story came in around the photographs. You received email from people who worked for the corporation that owned the rover, and you read documents through a terminal that was part of the fiction. Several websites existed outside the game and gave no sign of being part of it. Critics filed Extrasolar as an alternate reality game that had been talked into living inside one browser tab, and the Independent Games Festival nominated it for the Nuovo Award in 2014.

Rob Jagnow ran the studio. He holds a doctorate in computer graphics from MIT and had already shipped Cogs, a puzzle game about sliding tiles, which is about as far from a four year narrative as a two person studio can travel. The rover stayed slow deliberately. A free account got a few photographs a day, and money bought a shorter wait and nothing else.

I did not play this one, and the reason is close to funny. By 2014 I was working, and the thing Extrasolar turned into entertainment, pointing a camera at terrain and waiting to find out what the frame actually caught, is near enough to what I do on drones in Ankara now. The difference is which direction the effort runs in. The game sold people the wait and we spend our days trying to delete it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the slow loop ~

The delay was the product. Aiming the camera took seconds and the result took hours, so nobody could sit down and finish Extrasolar in an evening. You checked in before work, found four photographs of rock formations and one thing moving at the edge of the frame, and then you were stuck with that until the next batch. Players who stayed described it as a correspondence they kept up with the game.

That made it an odd commercial object. Reviewers liked the detail and the restraint, and Eurogamer treated it as a serious attempt to rebuild the alternate reality game for somebody who only has one tab and twenty minutes. The audience it found was small and extremely committed, and a few hundred devoted players do not cover a server bill.

~ the money ~

Lazy 8 went to Kickstarter for a second season with an $85,000 target, promising new content and features including topographic maps. The campaign failed. Meanwhile every photograph any player requested was rendered in the cloud at the studio's expense, so the running cost scaled with how much people enjoyed it.

~ the archive ~

In November 2018 the studio announced the game would close, and the servers went quiet on 1 December. Unusually, the domain is still there. extrasolar.com now answers as "Extrasolar: The Archive", a preserved copy of the narrative with a short first-person post-mortem on top of it, written so that other developers can still study what was built.

The post-mortem is blunt about the arithmetic. "Despite a cult following, the game was never self-sustaining. Running the cloud services cost me about $900/month. Eventually, it just didn't make sense to keep the servers running." The archive gives the service span as 17 February 2014 to 1 December 2018, which is the only place that figure exists in the operator's own words.

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