Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative

~ the obit ~

In 1996 three coworkers in the IT industry started building a space simulator in their evenings. After about a year of that, Scott Brown and the other two quit their jobs and leased one room for a studio they called NetDevil. It was the first game any of them had made, and by the time it shipped there were five people on it.

Jumpgate reached North American shops on 26 September 2001 with 3DO publishing it. That arrangement did not survive the year: the contract broke, NetDevil took the game back, and hired the Themis Group to handle support and run in-game events. A German publisher, Mightygames, had put out a European version that July and kept it going until 1 June 2005. When Mightygames stopped trading, NetDevil moved every account that was not banned onto the American server and renamed the thing the Worldwide Server.

Gazillion Entertainment bought NetDevil in July 2008 and the studio did well for a while under it, launching LEGO Universe in 2010, the biggest game it ever made. Then came the layoffs, and by 2011 the studio was effectively gone. Gazillion held the remaining Jumpgate server for another year and turned it off on 30 April 2012, ten years and seven months after launch.

In 2001 my connection at home was a 56k modem and games arrived on pressed discs from a shop. A monthly subscription billed in dollars to a server in America was one wall. The flight stick the game really wanted was a second one. Jumpgate was never sold into Turkey in any form, and the Europeans who found it mostly found it through English forums.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the flying worked ~

Most MMOs in 2001 asked you to select a target and press a button. Jumpgate handed you a ship with Newtonian momentum, so turning meant arguing with the direction you were already traveling in, and letting go of the throttle did nothing at all. People who had come off Elite or the Wing Commander games recognized it in about ninety seconds. Everybody else bounced.

The rest was more familiar. You picked one of three player factions, then made your living mining asteroid fields or running cargo between stations. Squads could plant their own stations out in the empty sectors, where there was otherwise nothing but rocks and a beacon.

~ the sequel that was finished and never shipped ~

NetDevil started a real sequel in 2007 called Jumpgate Evolution, with Codemasters lined up to publish. The plan was to operate both games in parallel, the way EverQuest II ran alongside EverQuest, and Evolution promised faster combat and territory you could take for your faction. Executive producer Hermann Peterscheck's pitch was that nobody was making a big action space MMO and the studio wanted to play one.

By 2009 Evolution was feature complete and in internal testing. It never came out. Codemasters and NetDevil both had a bad few years, the studio was shuttered in 2011, and a nearly finished space MMO went into a drawer nobody has opened since. The original outlived the game that was supposed to succeed it.

~ what is still flying ~

An emulator project called Jumpgate TRI picked the game up, and a fan run server came online in December 2013, about eighteen months after the official one went dark. It is still there. In 2019 some of the original developers surfaced with a spiritual successor named Warp Nexus, and then nothing further was heard.

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