Shadow Cities

~ the goodbye ~

Two things stood between me and this game and either one would have been enough. It was iPhone only, at a moment when an iPhone in Turkey cost what an iPhone in Turkey costs, which is to say the phone plus the tax on the phone. And it was a game about the people near you. Even with the handset, the map over Ankara in 2011 would have shown an empty city with one wizard in it.

Grey Area was founded in Helsinki in 2008 by Ville Vesterinen and three others, took seed money from Lifeline Ventures in 2010, and put Shadow Cities into the Finnish App Store on 10 November 2010. The premise was a parallel world laid over the real one. Your GPS position was your position in the game. The tram stop and the building you worked in became gateways, and a gateway belonged to whichever of the two factions had last taken it.

In February 2011 it raised two and a half million dollars in a round led by Index Ventures, then went to the rest of Europe that June and to North America after. At GDC 2011 it was the thing people cited when they argued that the phone was not a small console but a different machine entirely, because a console does not know where it is.

That argument was correct. The game built on it lasted less than three years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the map underneath ~

What made it work when it worked was that the map was not a metaphor. Other location games of that period pinned a badge to a coffee shop and called it play. Shadow Cities gave you a faction and a reason to care that someone two streets over had taken a gateway you thought of as yours. Players organized locally, defended their own neighborhoods, and turned commutes into patrol routes.

The money came from mana potions bought inside the game. The cost structure was servers plus a live world that had to keep running whether ten people or ten thousand were in your city, and the second half of that sentence is where the trouble lived.

~ why it needed a crowd ~

A location game has a density problem no amount of design solves. If nobody near you plays, the world is empty, and an empty world teaches you within a week that the game is not for you. So it grew in the places it launched first and stayed thin everywhere else, and thin places do not convert into paying players. Helsinki had a scene. Most cities did not.

The company had already read the room by 2013. What arrived four years later, on a different engine with a license people had loved since childhood and an Android build, was Pokemon Go, which solved the density problem by having eight hundred million people care about the brand before the app existed. Shadow Cities did the harder thing first, without that, on one handset.

~ the last three weeks ~

On 20 September 2013 Grey Area announced the closure, pulled the game from the App Store the same day, and stopped taking payments for mana potions. Players had until 7 October, which was more warning than most games of that size give, and it read as a studio doing the decent version of a thing it did not want to do.

The servers went off on schedule. Grey Area moved on to another title and the team scattered into a Finnish games industry that was, in those exact years, doing extremely well without any of this. What was lost was small in revenue and unusually specific in kind: a game where the walk to the shop was the level, and where the person defending the gateway at the end of your street was somebody who lived on your street.

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