Tales of Pirates

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~ the last words ~

The Chinese studio MOLI built it and IGG published it. Closed beta opened on 15 March 2007, open beta on the 29th, and a global English release followed on 24 March 2008. The art came straight off a manga shelf and the camera sat above and behind you. Downloading it cost nothing, in an era when that still needed explaining.

You started as one of four characters and picked a class that branched twice as you leveled. The hook everybody remembers is that at level 15 the game gave you a ship, and the naval combat that came with it was fought hull against hull with other players. Around that sat guild wars, world bosses, pets and a crafting system.

IGG released a direct sequel in 2011 and offered to move your characters across. Once the migration ran, the original servers went off and the old client stopped launching, so continuing meant downloading Tales of Pirates 2 whether you wanted the sequel or not. That second version carried the franchise for five more years. IGG announced its closure in the last week of January 2016 and shut the game and its website on 29 February.

Turkish internet cafes in the years I was in them ran Counter-Strike and not a great deal else, and by 2007 I had TTNet at home and a university course to worry about. Tales of Pirates found its crowd in the Philippines and in Brazil, on machines a generation behind mine, and it never had a Turkish client or a Turkish server. This one passed by entirely.

~ the record ~

~ the machine it ran on ~

The pirates are the least interesting thing about this game. What mattered is that in 2007 a 3D massively multiplayer world which ran acceptably on an office PC with an Intel chip and no graphics card was a genuine market, and IGG built directly at it. That decision is why the game spread through regions where the average machine was old and the average connection was thin.

The other half was the price, which stayed at zero until you wanted something out of the item shop. Plenty of western players in 2007 met the free-to-play MMO here first, before the model had a name they trusted.

~ the migration ~

Forced migrations are a particular kind of shutdown. Nobody announced a death in 2011, because in the publisher's accounting this was an upgrade. Your character survived the move. The world you had spent four years in did not, and the executable you had been double clicking since 2007 simply stopped opening one day. Five years later the sequel closed on a date that only exists every fourth year.

~ what IGG became ~

The farewell post named the four games IGG wanted everyone to move to, and all four were mobile: Castle Clash, Clash of Lords 2, Deck Heroes and a poker app. By 2016 the PC client was a cost center on a balance sheet that had moved to phones.

The game itself did not entirely vanish. Private servers under the original Asian name, Pirate King Online, have been running the old client for years, which is where anyone still sailing has been sailing since 2016.

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