Radical Heights

~ the obituary ~

The shutdown notice was printed inside the game. If you launched Radical Heights on 8 july 2018 you got a line telling you the servers were going off at ten that evening, eastern time. Nothing went out on the official accounts and no press release followed. The people who saw it were the people who had opened a dead studio's game on a sunday.

Boss Key Productions was founded on 30 april 2014 by Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee, both out of Epic Games, and it had one shipped title. LawBreakers arrived on 8 august 2017 with Nexon publishing, and within two months the concurrent player count on Steam was down near single digits. Nexon wrote off the investment and declined to spend more. Brussee left in december to go back to Epic. The studio had 65 people the previous september.

What was left of it spent roughly five months building a battle royale and self-published the result. Radical Heights was announced and released on the same day, 10 april 2018, into Steam Early Access under a label the studio invented for itself: X-Treme Early Access, which was an admission written as a joke. It was free to play with a fifteen dollar founder's pack for cosmetics. The setting was a 1980s television game show, all neon and BMX bikes, with cash raining down in gift boxes and prize wheels to spin between fights.

It peaked at 9,905 people playing at once and fell under a thousand within weeks. The reviews called it a rush job aimed at the money already flowing to PUBG and Fortnite, which it was. On 14 may Cliff Bleszinski posted that Boss Key had shut down, and said the servers would stay up for the near future.

In 2018 I was thirty four and doing computer vision work in Ankara, so the battle royale years reached me as clips on other people's screens rather than as anything I installed. There is a second distance here that matters more. The whole aesthetic of this game is a memory of American television that people my age in Turkey simply do not have. The prize wheel and the studio audience and the neon are supposed to land as childhood, and for me they were just decoration on a shooter I was never going to open.

~ the case file ~

~ five months ~

The arithmetic of the pivot is the whole story. A studio with sixty five salaries and a publisher walking away does not have time to make a good game, it has time to make a fast one. Five months is enough to build a map and a store, and nowhere near enough to build the systems that keep people playing after the first week.

Boss Key knew this, which is why the early access label got the extra word in front of it. The bet was that the genre was hot enough to carry an unfinished product long enough to finish it in public. Fortnite had already proved that a game could be rebuilt while millions of people were standing inside it. What that proof left out was that Epic was funding the rebuild out of an existing hit.

~ the money you kept ~

One idea in Radical Heights deserved a better home. Cash you collected during a match stayed with you afterward, win or lose, banked between rounds so you could spend it on better equipment next time or save it. Every other battle royale of that year stripped you back to nothing the moment you died, which is the honest version of the format and also the reason a bad run feels like a wasted twenty minutes.

Persistence turns a loss into deposits. It fits the game show frame perfectly, because a contestant who goes out in the first round still leaves with something. The mechanic was the part critics kept singling out as worth stealing, and by the time anyone had thought properly about it the servers were already off.

~ eight weeks of afterlife ~

The studio died on 14 may and the game kept running until 8 july, which is a strange window to be inside. Nobody was fixing anything, matchmaking was pulling from a pool of a few hundred people, and there was no announcement scheduled because there was no company left to schedule one. Players describe the last weeks as long waits in a lobby with the same handful of names.

The listing is still on Steam. You can download Radical Heights today for nothing and launch it, and it will sit there looking for a server that was turned off in 2018. That is the shape a free-to-play death leaves behind: no takedown and nothing to refund, just a client that still installs and a back end that stopped answering.

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