Huxley: The Dystopia

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

~ the obituary ~

huxley's entire life was a press cycle. for five years it existed as screenshots on gaming sites and a booth at e3, and by the time it was a thing you could log into it had become a korean-only service with seven months left on it. turkey never got a shot at this one. neither did most of the west.

webzen announced it at e3 2005. the pitch was a category name, mmofps, meaning a persistent world with characters that leveled and aiming that behaved like a shooter instead of a dice roll. it ran on unreal engine 3, which had barely been shown to anybody yet, and being an early ue3 title was most of what made the press pay attention.

the fiction was borrowed from aldous huxley by way of the title and not much else. a post-apocalyptic world where humanity had split into sapiens and alternatives fighting over what was left, with a third group called hybrids somewhere in the middle. the marketing copy promised thousands of players in the same battle.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

in february 2007 webzen sold chinese distribution rights to the9 for thirty five million us dollars. that was reported at the time as the largest export transaction for a korean-developed game. the9 was the company operating world of warcraft in china and had both the money and the reason to bet on whatever came next. the game it was buying had not been in a public beta anywhere on earth.

in june 2008 nhn usa took western distribution through its ijji portal, the free-to-play game site it ran in the states. the first north american closed beta opened in june 2009 for two weeks with a small number of accounts. a second ran from late july through 12 august 2009 with considerably more people in it.

~ the slide ~

the promises got quieter every year. the xbox 360 version had been part of the pitch from the start and had its own page on the marketing site, and then it stopped being mentioned. at the 2009 e3 press conference webzen said cross-platform play had been taken out of development. the player counts in those advertised battles came down from thousands to thirty-two on a side.

the engine advantage evaporated on its own. announcing in 2005 on an engine nobody had shipped is a real lead, but only if you ship soon after it. by 2010 there were dozens of released ue3 games and the thing huxley had been famous for was ordinary.

~ the actual end ~

in april 2010 the game was folded into hangame, nhn's korean portal, and on 3 may 2010 it went into korean open beta. that is the closest huxley ever came to being released. in august 2010 nhn usa handed publishing duties back to webzen, which is what a publisher does when it no longer wants a product sitting on its books.

korean service closed on 30 december 2010, seven months after the open beta opened. work on the international version stopped at the same time and webzen stopped listing the game at all. there was no relaunch and no other region. it did not even get the quiet private-server afterlife that keeps some dead korean mmos partly alive.

~ the long tail ~

huxleygame.com still resolves in 2026 and its old marketing pages are still sitting in the search index. the faq is there. so is the page for the xbox 360 version, describing a game that was cancelled before the pc one closed.

the thirty five million dollars is the part that stays interesting. it was paid in 2007 on the strength of a genre label and a demo reel, for a game that would run seven months in one country three years later. mmo publishing in that decade was mostly a market for confidence, and huxley is the receipt.

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