Tabula Rasa

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

~ the eulogy ~

i never played tabula rasa. by 2007 my MMO years had ended with ultima online. counter-strike and a UO private server were the things that filled my game-time for years. when tabula rasa came out, NCsoft put richard garriott on every box cover and in every press shot, and the message was that the man who made ultima was back. people who had been on UO in the 90s noticed. then we noticed it was a sci-fi shooter MMO with corridor levels, which was not what we missed about ultima.

it launched november 2, 2007. NCsoft had been spending on it for eight years. the development history included two complete reboots, one of which threw out a fantasy setting and started over with the science-fiction premise the final game used. the box said "richard garriott's tabula rasa." the prestige tag was the whole pitch.

peak subscriptions landed around 100,000 and did not stay there. by mid-2008 the game was bleeding players and NCsoft was bleeding patience. then garriott went to space.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the october 2008 spaceflight was supposed to be the marketing moment. garriott paid for a soyuz seat to the international space station as a private astronaut and brought tabula rasa with him symbolically. there were in-game events tied to the flight. while he was in orbit, NCsoft started preparing his exit. when he came back to earth in late october, he went into quarantine. the open letter announcing his departure from NCsoft went out november 11, 2008, while he was still in quarantine. he later said he did not write that letter and did not authorize his name on it.

~ the actual end ~

december 9, 2008, NCsoft told players the servers would close on february 28, 2009. the game went free-to-play for its final weeks. on the last day the servers came down and the game stopped existing in any playable form. there is no private-server scene for tabula rasa the way there is for ultima or city of heroes. the client and the back-end were tightly coupled and the lights went off cleanly.

garriott sued NCsoft over the way they characterized his departure. in july 2010 an austin jury awarded him $28 million. NCsoft appealed and lost in 2011. the money came out of a company that no longer had the game it had built around him.

~ what got buried with it ~

tabula rasa was the project that ended garriott's relationship with NCsoft and ended NCsoft's appetite for blank-slate american MMOs designed by name-brand developers. city of heroes outlasted it by a few years before its own shutdown. the entire 2003 to 2012 stretch of "big new themepark MMO that is not WoW" became a graveyard, and tabula rasa was the most expensive marker in it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »