MAG

~ the eulogy ~

MAG shipped on 26 January 2010 for the PlayStation 3 and did something no console shooter had managed before: it put 256 people into the same battle. Zipper Interactive, the Redmond studio behind the SOCOM series, built it as a war of attrition between three fictional private military companies, with territory that stayed won or lost between sessions.

The organizing idea was rank. Eight players made a squad, squads rolled up into platoons and platoons into companies, and at every level an actual player held the command slot and could paint objectives onto everyone else's screen. That gave a 256-person firefight a spine. It also meant your match could be ruined by a stranger with a headset and no plan.

Sony closed Zipper on 30 March 2012, two years after MAG shipped, weeks after the studio's last game reached the PS Vita. In July 2013 Sony announced that the MAG servers would go down along with both SOCOM titles, and on 28 January 2014 they did. MAG had no offline mode and no bots, so the disc stopped being a game that day.

In 2010 I was a computer engineer in Ankara with a desktop PC and no PlayStation 3. MAG needed a console and a headset, and it needed enough people doing the same thing at the same hour to fill 256 slots. That was never the shape of my gaming, which since the internet cafe years had been keyboard and mouse.

~ the dossier ~

~ two hundred and fifty six ~

Zipper wrote a new server architecture for MAG because nothing Sony already had would hold that many people in one map. Reviewers then spent most of their word count arguing about whether the number was worth what it cost. Metacritic settled at 76, and the complaints were consistent: it looked flat next to the shooters it was competing with, and it took a long time to teach you what any of it meant.

~ the unraveling ~

MAG's best hour required 255 other people to show up. Population is the load-bearing element in a design like this, and a shooter with no single-player mode has no floor under it once the population thins. The game was still selling when Zipper went, but the studio that knew how to keep the thing balanced was gone from March 2012 onward.

Sony's PS3 server estate was expensive to keep lit for games that had stopped earning, and by 2013 it was being switched off in batches. MAG went out in one of those batches rather than on its own schedule.

~ the day it died ~

28 January 2014 is a clean date because there is nothing to argue about. The servers went off and every copy of MAG on earth became unplayable at the same instant, which is not how most games end. Players had asked Sony for bot support so that something would still run on the disc. They did not get it.

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