Let It Die

» see letitdie.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The fiction starts with a date. In the year 2026 a tectonic event the game calls the Earth Rage tears up the world, the southwest corner of Tokyo breaks off into the ocean as a fog-covered island of about three and a half square miles, and a structure called the Tower of Barbs comes up out of the middle of it. There is supposed to be treasure at the top. Nobody who has gone up has come back. Grasshopper Manufacture wrote that in 2014 and shipped it in 2016, which gave them ten years of lead time on their own doomsday, and the online service was switched off on 1 September 2026.

It launched at PlayStation Experience on 3 December 2016, free, exclusive to PS4, with a Japanese release following on 2 February 2017 and a Steam version on 26 September 2018. You started at the bottom of the tower in your underwear. You picked up whatever was lying around, mostly improvised weapons, you ate mushrooms and whatever creatures you could catch to stay upright, and you climbed until something killed you. Watching all of it was Uncle Death, a grim reaper on a skateboard wearing headphones, who narrated the proceedings in a register somewhere between a tutorial voice and a stoner friend.

The hook underneath the splatter was asynchronous. When your character died, that character did not simply disappear from the save file. Its death data got packaged up and shipped into other people's copies of the game, where it stood around on some floor of the tower as a hostile fighter wearing whatever gear it had on when it fell. You never saw another player live, and the place was crowded with them anyway.

Goichi Suda founded Grasshopper and is its executive director, but the game itself was directed by Hideyuki Shin, and the distance from Suda's earlier work was deliberate. This was a free-to-play grinder with a premium currency called Death Metals in it, published by GungHo, a company whose other famous product is Puzzle and Dragons. A studio known for punk auteur games had built a free-to-play tower and filled it with other people's dead bodies, and it ran on that model for the next nine years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ nine years on the clock ~

It passed two million downloads by February 2017 and four million by April 2018, and the last figure anybody published was over six million in March 2020. For a game with no advertising budget and a storefront page that could not really explain itself, those are strong numbers. They came from the price being zero and the premise being short enough to repeat to somebody in one sentence.

I was thirty-two when it launched and already the wrong audience for it, for reasons of schedule rather than geography. A free-to-play tower you climb for years asks for your evenings on a standing basis, and by 2016 my evenings were not standing. What I finished in that decade had endings in it.

Nine years and nine months is a long run for a free-to-play console game, long enough that the people who built it were not the people who were running it at the end. Some of the people from the project's earliest days split off from Grasshopper to form Supertrick Games, and from 2022 that studio carried it. GungHo's own farewell note put the number plainly: over nine years of online operation, thanks to support for what they called a unique environment and gameplay.

The sequel arrived first. Let It Die: Inferno went into its second season on 10 March 2026, six days after the original's end-of-service date was announced. One studio was running a nine-year-old PS4 build with a nine-year-old server bill attached to it and shipping seasons for the new one at the same time, and that arrangement had a visible expiry on it.

~ the offline key ~

What happened on 1 September 2026 is a better ending than most games in this category get. GungHo had announced an offline version the previous December, in response to people asking for one, and on the day the servers stopped Let It Die: Offline Edition went on sale for PS4 and Steam. Existing players bought a $19.99 downloadable item called the Offline Key and kept their save. New players bought the whole game once, which is the first time anybody had been asked to pay for it at all.

The offline game is not the same game, and the differences tell you what the servers had been doing. Death Metals, the currency you used to buy your way out of a bad run, were taken out and replaced by a Kill Coin you earn, with the cosmetics that used to be sold now unlocked by playing. PvP survives in shape, with the machine running the opponents. The tower is still full of corpses in gear, except now they are generated rather than donated, which is the one loss that cannot be patched around.

Data transfer from the online saves stays open until 30 November 2026. letitdie.jp still answers, the Steam page still has a buy button on it, and a game that was free for nine years and nine months now costs twenty dollars and runs with the network cable out.

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