Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow

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

~ the eulogy ~

Between 2013 and 2023 Futurama was a show that had ended, and the only new Futurama being written anywhere on earth was inside a free phone game. That is a strange sentence and it was true for almost six years.

The show finished its seventh season on Comedy Central in september 2013 after two cancellations and two revivals. Four years later, on 29 june 2017, TinyCo and Jam City released Worlds of Tomorrow: a freemium city builder where you rebuilt New New York after a disaster and worked through story chapters collecting characters as you went. Standard shape for the era. The unusual part was the writing. Actual Futurama writers scripted the game's episodes and the original cast recorded new lines for it, so Billy West and Katey Sagal and the rest were still in a booth doing these voices years after the show had stopped.

The launch push was loud for a mobile tie-in. There was an animated trailer with Stephen Hawking and George Takei appearing as themselves, which the show had done before and which nobody else in mobile games could have arranged. The Writers Guild nominated the game for outstanding achievement in videogame writing. Metacritic settled at 64, which is about right for a good script wrapped around a timer.

I was thirty three when this came out and I have never played a city builder on a phone, so my distance from it is total. Futurama itself reached me the way most American animation reached Turkey, which is late and out of order, on cable and then on torrents. The game I only learned about while writing this.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The business model was the one everyone was running in 2017. The game was free and the events were timed, and the way past a timer was a currency called nixonbucks that you could earn slowly or buy immediately. Jam City had built a company on exactly this, and TinyCo had already done it once with a Family Guy game before this one.

For a while it worked well enough, on limited-time events tied to holidays and a steady flow of new chapters. By 2022 the numbers had gone quiet. Third-party estimates put it at roughly twenty thousand dollars of monthly revenue and single-digit thousands of downloads a month, which for a game with a licensed cast and union voice work is not a business anymore.

~ the canon problem ~

Here is what makes this grave different from the other mobile tie-ins. Worlds of Tomorrow was not decoration around the show. For six years it was the show's only output. New stories written by the people who wrote the show and performed by the people who performed it, and the only place any of that existed was a server owned by a mobile games publisher in Culver City.

When that server went off, all of it went. There is no episode list you can go watch and no archive of the scripts anywhere. Fan wikis hold summaries and some recorded footage survives on YouTube, which is the same rescue operation that happens under every dead game. But the work itself is gone in the way that a live service is always gone, which is completely.

~ the timing ~

Jam City announced the shutdown on 9 march 2023 and closed the game on 20 april. Hulu had already greenlit a Futurama revival in february 2022, more than a year earlier, and the new season aired on 24 july 2023.

So the game outlived the show's death by almost six years and then died three months before its resurrection. It carried the franchise through the whole gap and got shut off right at the finish line. Nobody at Jam City did anything cynical there. A freemium title from 2017 pulling twenty thousand dollars a month does not get saved by good timing anywhere else in the schedule. It is just an unusually clean example of what a licensed mobile game actually is: a temporary building that holds something real for a while, put up on land the tenant does not own.

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