Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising

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

~ the last words ~

Perpetual Entertainment announced Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising on 9 March 2005 with a release slated for the fourth quarter of that year. It arrived on 21 June 2011, six years and three months late, published by a company that had not existed when the announcement went out. The fifteen months it then lasted are the shortest part of the story.

The setting was Roman mythology rather than Roman history. You played a demigod in the late republic, aligned with one of six gods, and the design idea worth talking about was the minion system. Your character did not walk into a fight alone. You recruited from a roster of more than a hundred and thirty minions, and as you progressed you commanded up to four at once, which turned an encounter into a small squad problem instead of a duel. It demonstrated well. At E3 2006 the game collected Best of Show along with a stack of graphics awards while still being five years away from a player.

Closed beta opened in October 2006. In October 2007 Perpetual put development on indefinite hold to throw everything at Star Trek Online, and shut the beta server on the day it said so. Four months later Perpetual gave up Star Trek as well, and by 25 February 2008 the company was a static contact page. That collapse has its own grave on this site.

~ the record ~

~ the second owner ~

On 22 February 2010 Heatwave Interactive, an Austin studio staffed partly out of former Perpetual people, bought the intellectual property and the online game technology behind it. Its chief executive gave a public estimate of a year to eighteen months to finish the job. That estimate turned out to be roughly right, which after six years of the opposite counts for something.

The version that shipped in June 2011 asked for a box price and a monthly subscription, in a market that had spent the previous three years teaching people not to pay either. By early 2012 it had converted to free to play with a ten dollar unlock. The reviews were unkind and the sales were not there.

I did not play it and I am not sure who did. In 2011 I was in Ankara, well into an engineering career, and the subscription MMO had already become a thing you read about rather than a thing you joined. A Roman demigod game asking for money at the door that summer was competing against games that had stopped asking.

~ the maintenance window ~

In September 2012 the game and its forums went into maintenance. They never fully came back. Some players who already had accounts could still reach the servers afterward, which is why the date of death is arguable and why almost nobody outside that group registered the moment it happened. Steam eventually pulled the listing. There was no closing letter and no final event.

A game that took six years and two companies to release was switched off by leaving a maintenance page up until people stopped refreshing it. Heatwave went quiet not long after. The minion system, the one thing nearly every preview and every postmortem singled out as genuinely good, went with it.

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