Perpetual Entertainment

» see perpetualentertainment.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Perpetual Entertainment ran for six years and released nothing. Not a bad game, not a game that launched broken and got fixed. There is no product to review. What the company produced was press coverage, and for a while it produced a great deal of it, because it held two of the most-watched unbuilt worlds of the decade at the same time.

It started in San Francisco in march 2002 under Chris McKibbin and Joe Keene, and it took on two massively multiplayer games at once, which is a strange thing to attempt before shipping one. Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising was announced on 9 march 2005 with a release slated for the fourth quarter of that year. It was a Roman mythology world where your character commanded minions, and it was still being previewed and pushed back two full years after the date it was supposed to have come out on.

The second was Star Trek Online. On paper that license was worth more than the studio holding it: an enormous fictional universe with fifty years of source material and an audience that had been asking for exactly this since text muds. Perpetual also built a piece of middleware called the Perpetual Entertainment Platform for running networked games, and licensed it to BioWare, which is the one thing the company shipped that other developers actually used.

The layoffs started in december 2006 and came back harder in september 2007. In october the company suspended Gods and Heroes indefinitely to concentrate everything on Star Trek, and in the same month it moved its assets into a liquidating entity while a new company called P2 Entertainment picked up the intellectual property with the management unchanged. In january 2008 it gave up Star Trek Online. On 25 february the site was replaced with a static contact page and the reporting went out that P2 was closing entirely.

By 2008 I was on a real TTNet line and old enough to be paying attention, and none of this reached me as a loss. A subscription world that was previewed for four years and never came out is indistinguishable, from here, from one that simply never showed up. The distance games travelled to Turkey in that era was long enough that announced and released blurred together anyway. I have never played Star Trek Online, and the version of it I would have heard about first was the one that never existed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two games at once ~

The two projects were not complementary and the second one made the first one worse. Gods and Heroes had a real design idea in it, the minion system, where a player ran a small squad instead of one body, and by every account the pieces existing in 2006 were playable. What it did not have was the four extra years of funding that finishing an MMO takes when your studio has never done it before.

Star Trek was the thing that could raise money, so Star Trek is where the money went, and Gods and Heroes spent two years being the project that got cut whenever a round ran short. In october 2007 it was suspended so the remaining staff could focus on the license. Four months later there was no license and no staff.

~ what it became ~

Cryptic Studios took the Star Trek license in january 2008, restarted from nothing, and had Star Trek Online in stores on 2 february 2010, roughly two years after the studio that spent four years failing to build it stopped existing. It is still running in 2026, which puts it well past the lifespan of the company that first announced it.

Gods and Heroes was picked up by Heatwave Interactive, a studio built partly out of former Perpetual people, and finally came out in 2011, six years after its original release date and into a market that had moved on from subscription MMOs entirely. It did not last. The clean way to read Perpetual is that it was right about both properties and wrong about how many of them one studio can carry, and other people collected on both of its bets.

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