Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown

» see shadowrun-chronicles.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 18 October 2018 the Steam price of Shadowrun Chronicles was set to $0.00, which is the move Valve stores make when something is coming off sale rather than being given away. A few days before that, the developer had posted a farewell on the game's own forum under the handle primetide, opening with the greeting the setting uses for people you trust: Hoi Chummers.

Two reasons were given. The license had run its course and, in his wording, with no money to show for the game Microsoft had not exactly been jumping at the chance to renew it. Alongside that, persistent ransomware attacks on the servers had become too much work to fend off for a game that had barely been covering its own hosting bill for some time. The date set for the end was 30 November 2018.

The license mattered here more than licenses usually do. Microsoft has held the Shadowrun video game rights since it bought FASA Interactive in 1999, and the terms it granted Cliffhanger Productions covered online play and nothing else. That is why Boston Lockdown shipped without an offline mode. Even the solo route through the campaign, played alongside computer-controlled runners instead of other people, went through the server, so when the server stopped the single-player stopped with it.

~ the record ~

~ what the backers bought ~

The campaign ran from 18 July to 14 August 2012 under the name Shadowrun Online and closed with 6,003 backers and $558,863 against a goal of half a million. The studio behind it was Cliffhanger Productions in Vienna. The word online was carrying a great deal of weight in that title, and what a lot of people read into it was a persistent world with other runners in it.

Six thousand and three is a small enough number that I can say with some confidence I was not one of them. What those who were got, on 28 April 2015 and under a new name, was a turn-based tactical game in the X-COM shape with co-op and a story campaign. That is a reasonable thing to build. It is not the thing the title had implied, and the reviews came apart along exactly that seam, with Metacritic settling at 61 somewhere between an IGN review that gave it 6.5 and praised the computer-controlled partners and a GameSpot review that gave it 3 and called it a bad game.

The comparison nobody in Vienna could get away from was on the same platform in the same year. Harebrained Schemes had run its own Shadowrun campaign three months earlier, raised over $1.8 million and shipped Shadowrun Returns in July 2013, with two sequels after that. Same rights holder, same funding mechanism.

~ the letter ~

The farewell post is worth reading as a document because it does not perform. It thanks community members by their forum handles and admits, in that exact word, that the launch had been botched. Its author takes open pride in the Boston Lockdown plot having been absorbed into the tabletop canon as a campaign book, and hands Scott Schletz the credit for the writing. Then he closes out a decade at Cliffhanger and signs off with see you in the Shadows.

Attached to the end of it is the detail that says what kind of studio this was: a note that he would keep making games, and a plug for the Jagged Alliance board game he was putting out through a small venture on the side.

~ the museum in oakland ~

On 30 November 2018, the day the lights went out, primetide posted again to say the game had been backed up and stored against the chance of a return. The plan was for the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, California to take over hosting, under conditions he described as fairly steep.

In May 2019 he reported that Microsoft was not opposed to the idea. Through the rest of that year the review sat somewhere outside his control. In 2020 the museum did some work toward a revival and went looking for developers to help, and then the pandemic forced it to pull back and concentrate on staying open at all. Eight years on, nothing runs.

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