Infantry Online

» see infantry.station.sony.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In a Turkish internet cafe around 2003 you played whatever the owner had installed. A disc arrived, it went onto every machine in the room, and that was the catalog for the next several months. A free American shooter that wanted its own account and a steady connection to a server on the other side of the Atlantic was never getting onto that disc, so Infantry Online spent twelve years running about two rooms away from anything I ever touched.

It came out of Harmless Games LLC in 1999, at a moment when almost nobody was giving away a persistent online shooter. The game was drawn in sprites and viewed from above, with soldiers and vehicles moving across terrain that looked closer to a 1993 strategy title than to anything else selling that year. What made it strange was the zone system. Instead of one game there were dozens, each with its own weapon set and its own win condition, and switching zones meant switching genres without switching programs.

Sony Online Entertainment bought Harmless Games in October 2000 and inherited a game it never quite knew what to do with. In May 2002 it bolted a $6.95 monthly subscription onto the top while keeping a limited free tier underneath, which is a thing publishers did before anyone had settled on what free-to-play meant. By June 2007 the whole argument had been dropped and Infantry was included in Station Pass, then made free outright when station.com was rebuilt that summer.

The end arrived as administration. On 29 February 2012 Sony sent a mass email announcing four closures for the end of March: Infantry and Cosmic Rift on the action side, plus Star Chamber and EverQuest Online Adventures. The servers went off on 29 March. Prepaid time was refunded. The statement said that there comes a time when it is best for developers to move on to the next adventure, which is the sound a company makes when the real answer is that four small things cost more attention than they returned.

~ the case file ~

~ what it played like ~

The pitch was scale without spectacle. Infantry put a large number of players onto a single flat map and gave them projectile weapons that actually traveled, plus vehicles that other players had to crew. Because everything was sprites the client stayed tiny and the server could hold far more people than a 3D game of the same year could afford. In 1999 that trade was worth making, and it stayed worth making for the people who had already made it.

The zones did most of the work. One would be a straightforward capture fight and the next would be something a volunteer had written that had no equivalent anywhere else. Sony inherited that whole apparatus and mostly left it alone, which turned out to be the correct decision by accident. The game aged into a set of small communities maintaining their own corners of it, and the publisher's job shrank down to keeping a login server answering.

~ the day it died ~

Four games in one email is worth sitting with. Star Chamber was a card game and EverQuest Online Adventures was the PlayStation 2 MMO that had been genuinely significant on a console with no hard drive. Infantry and Cosmic Rift were the last two of Sony's late-nineties action experiments still breathing. None of them were expensive to run. What they cost was the small ongoing tax of existing on a balance sheet, and eventually somebody totals that column.

This is the second time in two days that a Sony action title from that era turns out to have died of tidying rather than of failure. Tanarus lasted until 2010 and Infantry until 2012, and neither was killed by an empty server or a lost lawsuit. They were killed by a decision that older things should stop being on the list.

~ the long tail ~

The part that separates Infantry from most of this catalog is what happened on 30 March. The community did not disperse. Players worked out the protocol and stood their own servers up, relaunching the game as Free Infantry at freeinfantry.com, run at cost by volunteers with no company behind it. That has been going since 2012, which means the unofficial version has now outlasted the official one.

It raises a question this site does not have a clean answer for. The thing Sony switched off is dead in every sense that matters to a company, with no revenue and no team. The thing the players run is the same game with the same sprites and the same zone files. Whether that counts as survival depends on whether you think a game is a service or a set of rules, and Infantry is decent evidence that those are two different objects which happened to share a name for twelve years.

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