Family Guy Online

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

~ the last words ~

Family Guy arrived in Turkey the way American animation arrived for anyone with a connection here in the 2000s, as a file with a subtitle track sitting next to it. The show had a real audience among people my age. A browser MMO of the show, running on Fox's servers with a soft currency called clams, did not, and I do not think it had one anywhere.

It opened in public beta on 17 April 2012. Roadhouse Interactive in Vancouver built it with A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Games for 20th Century Fox, cel-shaded, set in Quahog, with the show's own voice actors recording the lines their characters said when you took a quest from them. That last part is not cheap and it tells you the licensing side of this was taken seriously by somebody.

Underneath the cartoon it was a plain MMO. You made a character and picked a role, and the show's cast were slotted into the standard party jobs, with Peter as the tank and Lois as the healer. There were two currencies. There was a cash shop. It was the same machine everyone was shipping in 2012, wearing a face that had been on television since 1999.

The mismatch is the whole story. The free browser MMO with a plugin and a membership was a form built for children, and Family Guy's audience was adults who had jobs and a Steam library. I was twenty eight that year and my games came from Steam like everyone else's did by then. Nobody was going to leave that to grind quests in a web page for a cartoon they could simply watch.

~ the record ~

~ nine months in beta ~

It never left public beta, which is worth sitting with. Beta was not a soft launch here, it was the entire lifespan. Every player who ever logged in played an unfinished build, and the finished version that all of it was pointing at was never funded.

The notice went up in December 2012: development would not continue past beta and the service would end. The servers stopped on 18 January 2013. Anything bought with real money in the previous sixty days was refunded, which is the polite version of this ending and rarer than it should be.

~ what replaced it ~

Roadhouse Interactive kept going for almost four more years on licensed mobile work. On 1 September 2016 more than a hundred people were told at once that they no longer had jobs and the doors on West 7th Avenue were locked. Family Guy Online was the studio's first game, and the studio outlived it by less than four years.

Nothing playable survives. A server-side browser world with no client to keep leaves behind a fan wiki and a folder of screenshots, which is what exists. The show is still running. It has outlived its own MMO by more than a decade, and almost nobody who watches it has any idea the thing ever existed.

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