Kamen Rider Megaton Smash

» see dmm.com/netgame/feature/megasma.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The premise was invented from scratch, which is rare for a licensed children's property. In the year 20XX, with evil organizations running large-scale destruction across the world, humanity sets up a secret body called IRSA, the International RIDER Support Agency, to stand alongside the Riders against them. No television series contains this. Eighting wrote it for a browser game and the developer's own site still describes the thing as completely original.

It ran in a PC browser, which in Japan in 2015 meant it ran on DMM, the commerce and entertainment portal that by then had become one of the main storefronts for browser-based games. Bandai Namco Online operated it. The open beta started on 18 August 2015 and the official service three days after, on the 21st. 4Gamer carried twenty-four news items about it over the following months, a steady drip of limited-time quests and event Riders, ending in February 2016.

A little over four months after that last news item, it was over. The game stopped at 13:59 on 30 June 2016, one minute before two in the afternoon, and the remaining services were shut on 28 July at two o'clock exactly. Nothing was published about why. There is no farewell letter and no producer statement, only a date on a developer's portfolio page and a two-sentence notice on a shopfront.

~ the chronicle ~

~ an original story inside a borrowed world ~

Licensed games usually retell. You get the plot of the current series with the fights playable, because that is what the license is for and what the audience turned up expecting. Megaton Smash did the opposite with the same material: it kept the Riders and threw away the stories, building an institutional frame of its own in which a fictional agency recruits them.

That costs more and sells no better, and it is the sort of decision a developer makes when it wants the job to be interesting. Eighting is a studio with a long action-game record, and it built that frame around a browser game whose entire commercial life lasted ten months. The agency and its acronym are still printed on the studio's own site, under the summary of a game nobody can open.

~ a game with no address of its own ~

Most dead games leave a domain behind, even if it only redirects. This one never had one. Its official site was a product page inside DMM, which means its whole public existence was a path on somebody else's host, and when the game ended the page was simply rewritten into a tombstone.

That tombstone survives in the archive, complete in a pair of sentences: the game ended at 2pm on Thursday 28 July 2016, and thank you for your patronage, please continue to use DMM GAMES. The second half of a shutdown notice is doing marketing for the storefront, because the storefront wrote the notice. The capture holding it was taken in November 2017, fifteen months after the fact.

The developer's portfolio page is the better record. It names the operator and carries the end date down to the minute, under a copyright line with the television rights-holders in it. For a product whose own publisher said nothing, the most precise surviving document is a line in a contractor's portfolio.

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