High School Story

~ the last words ~

High School Story shipped on 13 September 2013 as a sister to Pixelberry's earlier Surviving High School, reusing some of its cast. The premise was construction rather than drama: you were handed an empty lot and built a high school on it, recruiting students by clique and buying the hangouts they would spend their time in. Quests and hangouts both paid out coins, and rings were the currency you bought with real money when you did not want to wait.

It was an American high school in the way that American high schools exist on television, which is to say organized entirely around cliques. You picked one of three to start in and unlocked the combinations later by recruiting or by throwing parties. That setting is a large part of why the game traveled where it did and did not travel elsewhere: a Turkish lise has no equivalent social machinery to collect, so the whole central mechanic reads as foreign rather than familiar.

It ran for nine years and was well liked, holding 4.5 out of 5 on both app stores. What makes it worth a headstone rather than a line in a list is what Pixelberry did with it in 2013, and what the studio did with the servers for four years after it stopped caring about the game.

~ the record ~

~ the Cybersmile money ~

In 2013 Pixelberry ran an anti-bullying campaign inside the game, matching players' in-app purchases and handing the result to The Cybersmile Foundation. It came to $300,000. The studio also wired a route from the game to the charity, so a teenager playing it could contact Cybersmile about a bullying problem, and Cybersmile reported more than a hundred teenagers a week getting in touch because of the game.

The following summer it did the same thing with the National Eating Disorders Association, funding resources for players with body image issues. These were not promotional gestures bolted on to a storefront. They were written into the quest line, which is the only place a teenager in that game was ever going to read them.

~ the long quiet ~

On 4 June 2018 Pixelberry posted on the game's Facebook page that it was ending support. A finale quest went out on 18 June and a final update followed in the weeks after that. By then the studio's attention had moved to Choices, its visual novel platform, which is where it still is.

Then nothing happened for four years. The servers stayed up and players kept running the existing quests, with nothing new ever arriving. That is an unusual amount of patience for a mobile studio, and it means the real death date is not the date Pixelberry stopped working on it.

~ the final sunset ~

On 15 July 2022 Pixelberry announced on its blog that High School Story and Hollywood U would both have their servers shut down permanently on 10 August. It called the operation The Final Sunset, and both games came off the App Store and Google Play. Being server-dependent, they did not keep working on the devices they were already installed on.

Nine years is a long run for a free-to-play mobile game, and four of those years were the studio keeping the lights on for people it had stopped writing for. The sunset notice gave them twenty-six days.

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