Motor City Online

~ the eulogy ~

in 2001 the racing that reached my internet cafe came cracked off a cd, need for speed and colin mcrae passed around on burned discs. a subscription racing mmo run out of ea seattle was never going to be part of that world. motor city online wanted a credit card, a monthly fee, and a broadband line, and i had none of those in turkey in 2001. so this is a grave for a game i watched from very far away.

motor city online came out on october 29 2001, developed by ea seattle. it had started life inside the need for speed series, under the name need for speed: motor city, before ea pulled out the single player parts and rebuilt it as a persistent online world. what was left was a game about classic american cars, muscle machines from the 1930s through the 1970s, that you rebuilt and raced against other people online.

that car obsession was the whole appeal. this was not arcade racing with borrowed supercars, it was a slow economy of buying a rusted classic and sinking money and parts into it until it could beat someone else's build. for the right kind of gearhead it was close to perfect. there just were not enough of them paying every month to keep it alive.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the loop was part role playing game and part car show. you earned money by racing and spent it on cars and upgrades, and your garage was your character. an american muscle car from before most players were born was the thing you leveled up, which gave the game a very particular flavor that nothing else on the market had at the time.

it also arrived at an awkward moment for the whole idea. paying a monthly fee to play one game was still a hard sell in 2001, and a niche racing world had a smaller pool of willing subscribers than the fantasy worlds that were figuring the model out at the same time. the thing that made motor city online special, its narrow focus, was also the ceiling on how many people would ever pay for it.

~ the actual end ~

by 2003 the subscriber numbers were not there and the servers were slipping in maintenance. ea decided to pull the plug and put its online attention behind the sims online, which it was betting much bigger on. motor city online went offline on august 29 2003, less than two years after launch. years later, in 2018, people worked out how to run the client again on their own, offline and alone, which is the closest thing a dead always-online game gets to a headstone you can visit.

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