JamLegend

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

~ the last words ~

Guitar Hero had established by 2008 that the rhythm game was a hardware business. You bought a console and then you bought a plastic guitar to plug into it, and a second one if anybody was going to play with you, and the publisher made most of its money on the peripherals rather than the discs. Andrew Lee started JamLegend with two co-founders, Arjun Lall and Ryan Wilson, on the opposite assumption: that the actual pleasure was in hitting the notes on time and the plastic was overhead.

It ran in Flash inside a browser tab, on an ordinary keyboard, with the data sitting on Amazon's servers and an open beta from 4 December 2008. Five million plays by March 2009, and over 1,620 songs by June 2010, a large share of them uploaded and charted by players who liked making the note tracks more than playing them. That is the same volunteer economy that has always kept rhythm games alive. Two million accounts and a hundred and ten million plays by the end.

The end came from the money rather than the players. Hadi Partovi had led a two million dollar round, and in April 2011 Zynga made the offer that startups in that position took: it hired the people and left the product. The announcement was 19 April, the site closed on 29 April, and user data was wiped on the 28th. Zynga at that point was assembling the team that would ship its own games, and a browser rhythm game with two million users was worth less to it than the four or five engineers who had built one.

The plastic instrument boom mostly did not happen where I was. Consoles in Turkey carried import prices that made a Guitar Hero bundle a genuinely serious purchase, and the default gaming machine was the PC, at home or in the cafe. A version that asked for nothing but a keyboard and a browser was exactly the right shape for that constraint. I did not play this one, but the shape is familiar. The Flash tab is where gaming went for everybody whose hardware was somebody else's assumption.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Playing a rhythm game on a keyboard sounds like a compromise and mostly is not. The keys sit closer together than frets but the timing window is identical, and the skill transferred well enough that the leaderboards meant something. What you lose is the performance, the standing up and holding an object shaped like an instrument, which is a real loss in a room with other people and no loss at all when you are playing alone at two in the morning.

The catalog was the harder problem, and JamLegend solved it the only way a startup could. It licensed what it could from labels and independents, then let the community build note charts for everything else. That produced a library far larger than any boxed game could carry, at the cost of quality control that nobody was really performing. The most-played tracks on the site were community productions rather than the licensed hits.

~ the acqui-hire ~

Zynga in 2011 was months from an IPO and was buying engineering teams at a pace that made individual products irrelevant. Nobody disclosed a price. The public statement said the team would move on to new ventures, which is the standard formulation for a deal where the acquirer has explicitly declined to keep the thing that made the team worth hiring.

It is worth being clear about what this costs. An acquisition that keeps the product gives users a migration path and somewhere for their history to land. An acqui-hire gives them a date. JamLegend's players got ten days of notice and a data deletion scheduled before the site itself closed, which is an ordering that tells you exactly how much of the shutdown was planned around the users.

~ what got deleted ~

Every score, every chart a player had spent hours syncing by hand, and every profile went with it in April 2011. The note charts are the part worth mourning. A good chart is a transcription, and the people making them were doing unpaid musical labor in a format that only ran on that one site. There is no archive because Flash content on a live server is not a file anybody thought to save.

The category itself was already dying while this was happening. Activision shut down its Guitar Hero business unit in February 2011, two months before JamLegend closed, and Harmonix had been sold off by Viacom the previous December. The browser version and the console version died in the same season for different reasons, and the thing everybody thought was permanent, a generation who knew how to play a five-button fretboard, turned out to be as disposable as the peripherals.

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