Paperman

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

~ the last words ~

Shutdown notices are written by lawyers wearing a marketing hat, and they almost never say anything. This one did. Gamepot posted it on 26 September 2016 and the operative sentence reads, in full: since April 2015 we changed the development company and continued operating, but we were unable to fix fatal defects such as the client force-quitting, and we judged that under the present structure it would be difficult to go on providing a Paperman our customers could be satisfied with. Then it apologized twice, once to the people still playing and once, separately, to the people who had been waiting for the bugs to be fixed.

That second apology is the whole obituary. Somewhere in there is a community that had filed the same crash report for years and been told a new studio was coming in to deal with it. They waited through 2015 and most of 2016, and got a closure notice instead. The schedule attached to the notice gave them three months: new registrations and sales of the paid point currency stopped on 26 October at noon, and the game itself ran until 26 December at noon.

It had been limping toward that for a while, but it had also been an odd and well-liked thing. Paperman was a free online shooter in which every character was a paper cutout. Turn one side-on and it narrowed to a line. Shoot one and you punched a hole through it, with no blood anywhere in the game, because there was no meat to spill. The cast were anime characters voiced by working actors, and the maps ran from real cities to places that could not exist. Hit detection was strict enough that the balance ended up favoring people who had been playing for years.

~ the record ~

~ it nearly died before it launched ~

Cykan Games showed it at Tokyo Game Show on 20 September 2007 and ran a closed beta the following January. On 31 March 2008, with the open beta three weeks old, Cykan announced it was leaving the online game business altogether. 4Gamer's headline that day was a question: what happens to PaperMan now?

What happened was Gamepot, which took the operating rights on 28 April 2008. It rebooted the betas that December and opened the real service on 12 February 2009, with a simultaneous launch on Hangame. So the game people remember is already the second attempt. It got a feature-phone companion in December 2010 whose items carried over to the PC version, and a six-minute web anime in August 2011, which is a level of investment nobody makes in a product they expect to close.

~ who buried whom ~

Gamepot did not long outlive its game. GMO Internet had bought the company in November 2013 and renamed it GMO Gamepot on 1 January 2014. On 1 December 2017, eleven months after Paperman went dark, GMO Gamepot was dissolved into its parent. The company that could not fix the crash was itself absorbed before the next Christmas came around.

Every date in this grave comes out of Japanese pages, most of them archived, and I only have the exact minute because somebody's crawler happened to catch the notice page in September 2016 before the site came down. So what I have of this one is an archive snapshot, not a memory of playing it.

~ the kingdom of papyrus ~

The domain still answers. It serves a fan site, and the page's title is a question put to whoever arrives there by accident almost a decade late: are you looking for the Kingdom of Papyrus? The kingdom was the game's setting. Someone renews that domain every year in order to keep asking it.

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