FusionFall

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

~ the last words ~

fusionfall was a real mmo. unity 3d running in the browser, with real player housing and over fifty cartoon network characters acting as npcs. ben 10 was there. dexter and the powerpuff girls had their own neighborhoods. you collected tiny chibi versions of the characters, called nanos, by defeating their evil doppelgangers. it launched january 13, 2009 and it was, for one short stretch, the most ambitious thing cartoon network had ever shipped on a computer.

the business model was strange. levels one through five were free. anything past level five required a monthly subscription, paid either by credit card or by a redeemable card you bought at target. that part is what most adults who remember fusionfall remember most. the cards were ten dollars each. they sat in the same retail real estate as world of warcraft time codes, except sized for nine year olds. by april 2010 cartoon network gave up on the subscription model and went free to play. the game lasted three more years on ad revenue.

fusionfall sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was western kids in english speaking countries, ages nine to thirteen, in 2009. by 2009 i was twenty five, writing other peoples software for a living, and the only mmo i had ever paid attention to was a private ultima online server years earlier. cartoon network played in turkey as cartoon network, dubbed in turkish on cable, but the mmo was an american browser thing aimed at american browser kids. it did not have a turkish version. it did not need to.

~ the record ~

~ the postmortem ~

on august 23, 2013, cartoon network announced the servers would close in six days. on august 29 they did. the public reasoning was ad revenue collapse. by 2013 the kids who were nine in 2009 were teenagers who had moved on, and the new nine year olds were on tablets playing mobile games. browser unity was a 2009 idea, and 2013 children did not boot pc browsers to play games.

the cynical reading is simpler. it was a half decade old mmo with declining engagement and a server bill that did not fit the channel budget. they pulled the plug.

~ the long tail ~

by 2017 the fans had reverse engineered the client and stood up two unofficial revivals. fusionfall retro was the original 2009 game, server side reconstructed from network captures. fusionfall legacy was the same game plus new content. they ran for three years. on april 16, 2020 cartoon network sent dmca takedowns to both projects and the servers went dark again, this time for legal reasons.

retrospective articles keep coming back to it. once a year someone writes a piece called "this cartoon network mmo deserves a remake" or "i was nine and this game ruined me for every later mmo." the audience is small but it shows up every time. the kids who paid in subscription cards at target are now adults who remember every nano they collected.

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