Tanarus

» see tanarus.station.sony.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In December 1997 I had a 33.6k modem in Turkey and the closest thing to online multiplayer was a phone bill. Real-time combat against players in North America over that link was not a money problem, it was a physics problem. The round trip alone would have turned every shot into a guess, and no amount of wanting it would have moved the packets faster. Tanarus was a US product on a US network at US latency, which is a border that does not show up on any map.

It was built by Verant Interactive under John Smedley and published by Sony Interactive Studios America. The original name was Armorgeddon, dropped when somebody found another game already using it. North America got it on 12 December 1997 and Europe the year after, at $9.95 a month rising to $9.99, which was real money for a game in 1997 and was charged monthly at a time when most games were bought once.

The game itself was tanks. Third-person armored combat in enclosed arenas, up to four teams of five, with chassis and weapon loadouts you picked before dropping in. Reviewers could not agree on it at all: GameSpot gave it 8 out of 10 and PC Gamer 87 percent, while Computer Gaming World put it at 2.5 out of 5. The GameSpot review conceded the fee looked steep and then argued there was nothing else online like it, which was true and stayed true for a decade.

The part worth pausing on is what came next for the people who made it. Verant's following project was EverQuest, so this is the game EverQuest's studio shipped first, and it is the one nobody mentions.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it lasted ~

Tanarus survived by costing almost nothing to keep alive. The servers were small, the client stopped changing, and the game got folded into Sony's Station Pass subscription next to Cosmic Rift and Infantry Online, where a handful of veterans kept the arenas populated enough to be worth logging into. When station.com was redesigned in July 2007 the whole set went free, which removed the last reason anyone had to make a decision about it.

That is a genuinely unusual way for an online game to age. The famous MMO deaths are expensive ones, where a studio spends years and tens of millions and the servers close inside a year. Tanarus did the opposite. It was cheap, it was finished, and it sat in a corner of Sony's catalog quietly outliving nearly every game launched to compete with it, because there was never enough money involved for anyone to bother making a decision.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went up on the forums on 10 May 2010 and gave exactly one month. The long and proud thirteen year battle waged in Tanarus, it said, would come to a close at 12:00pm PT on 06/10/10 when SOE shut down the servers. Thirteen years was the count from the 1997 launch, and the phrasing is the only ceremonial thing about the whole ending.

At noon Pacific on 10 June 2010 the arenas emptied for good. There was no sale of the property and no attempt to move the players anywhere else, because there was nowhere obviously similar to move them to.

~ the long tail ~

The client is on the Internet Archive now, which is where a game with no server goes to be technically preserved and functionally dead. You can download it and look at the menus. The thing it needed to connect to has not existed since 2010 and no fan revival has ever brought it back.

What Tanarus proves is that an online game does not need to be popular to be permanent, it needs to be cheap. Twelve and a half years is longer than almost anything in this category manages, and it was bought entirely with low expectations. The moment its owner did the arithmetic on rack space against a player count nobody had checked in years, the answer took about a month to arrive.

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