Gundam Diorama Front

» see gdf.bandainamco-ol.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I have never built a Gunpla kit and the fandom this game was made for is one I can describe but not claim. What drew me to it was a dating problem rather than a memory: the public record disagrees with itself about when it died, and the disagreement is instructive.

Bandai Namco Online started the official service at 17:00 on 26 March 2015. It was a PC online game about assembling dioramas, which in practice meant arranging mobile suits and pilots from across the Gundam continuity into a formation and sending that formation at somebody else's. Free to play with items for sale, and players addressed throughout as 司令官, commander.

Then it was rebuilt. A major update on 26 October 2016 relaunched it as Gundam Diorama Front 2nd. There was a ver.2.1 after that, and on 28 August 2018 another update turned it into Gundam Diorama Front 3rd. Same operator and the same account carried across every one of them, with a new number on the end of the name each time.

The operator's own closing notice, posted at 18:30 on 7 September 2022, counts all of it as one continuous run of seven years from the launch in March 2015, and lists every one of those version numbers as an update along the way rather than as a separate product. The service ended at 00:00 on 28 November 2022, which is the instant that closes 27 November. That is 2,803 days.

~ the dossier ~

~ second, then third ~

The reason this matters beyond bookkeeping is that a relaunch leaves the same evidence as a death. The old name stops appearing and the front page changes out from under it. Catalogs built by scraping category trees record 26 October 2016 as the end of Gundam Diorama Front, because on 27 October 2016 there was no longer a thing by that exact name. The game was six years from finished.

~ the last three days ~

New units kept arriving until the update of 12 October 2022, forty-six days from the end. On 24 November the operator started two fresh battle events, a diorama defense and a 総力戦 all-out battle, with three days left on the clock. On 25 November a memorial site went live on a separate subdomain.

So the monument arrived after the last of the new content and before the servers went. A game that had been given two second lives spent its final four days behaving as though it had a third coming.

~ three storefronts ~

It sold through BNID, Bandai Namco's own account system, and also through Hange and Yahoo! Games, each with its own currency. BNID had バナコイン, Hange and Yahoo had plain coins. All purchasing stopped at the regular maintenance on 26 October 2022, a month before the end, and unspent Banacoin stayed usable on other Bandai Namco services afterward. Nothing was refunded in cash, and items held at closing time converted to nothing at all.

~ what midnight meant ~

The schedule notice of 8 September 2022 laid the whole wind-down out in advance: purchases off on 26 October, then the service itself over at 00:00 on 28 November. One more date sat underneath those, and that is the one I find hardest to shake. The support desk stayed open until 30 November. For two days after the game stopped existing somebody was still staffing a contact form, ready to answer questions about a product that could no longer be opened.

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