Tetra Master (テトラマスター)

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

~ the eulogy ~

The card game buried inside Final Fantasy IX in 2000 had a reputation among players for being obscure about how it worked. Square pulled it out and launched it on the PlayOnline network on 16 May 2002, as Tetra Master. The online one went further than the original. You traded cards with other people and bid for them at auction, and by the end it had added trap cards and three-player matches, with everyone ranked monthly.

It cost a hundred yen a month before tax, which was close to nothing, and PlayOnline itself was free to sit in. One player per PlayOnline ID. On PlayStation 2 you needed the hard drive that came with the PlayStation BB Unit, because the console on its own could not hold it.

The part that decided its fate was how you got hold of it. Tetra Master was never sold on a shelf. The registration code came bundled inside other Square boxes, Final Fantasy XI most of all, and Front Mission Online after that, which already has its own grave here. So the audience for the card game was always a subset of the audience for something bigger, and it only ever grew when one of those bigger things did.

~ the dossier ~

~ the card game you could not buy ~

Japanese Wikipedia's account of the membership is blunt and carries no citation, so it belongs here as what it is rather than as a measurement: it says the player base stalled, and that finding nobody at all online was not unusual. The same passage adds the detail that makes the whole arrangement legible. During Final Fantasy XI's maintenance windows, when the big game was down, Tetra Master would briefly fill up.

That is a card game whose busiest hours were the hours another game was switched off. There is no published player count for any point in its life, and nobody has produced one since.

~ eight hundred bans ~

In February 2005 Square Enix banned around 800 accounts across Final Fantasy XI and Tetra Master, for monopolizing areas where items and creatures appeared. It is the one moment in its whole life when the service generated a headline outside its own player base, and it did so as a footnote to the larger game's enforcement sweep.

The money was never the obstacle. The barrier was everything around it: a PlayStation 2 with an extra hard drive fitted, and a registration code that only ever arrived inside a different product. This was a Japanese console network's idea of an online card game. It reached as far as Final Fantasy XI reached, which was further than most Japanese services of its era managed and still nowhere near where I was sitting.

~ the mahjong table next door ~

雀鳳楼 deserves a line here because it went down in the same announcement. It was four-player mahjong, PlayStation 2 only, needing the BB Unit and a DualShock 2, with spectating for people who only wanted to watch and tables split by how long a game should run. It ran numbered tournaments to the very end: the PlayOnline home page on 15 November 2010 was leading with the closing results of the fifty-eighth of them, prize winners and all, a month and a half before the servers went off. It has never had a Japanese Wikipedia article of its own.

~ the last notice on playonline ~

On 22 September 2010 PlayOnline posted a notice whose title translates as an important announcement regarding service termination. It covered Tetra Master and the four-player mahjong game 雀鳳楼 together, and a second notice the same day cut pieces out of PlayOnline Plus. Both games ended on 31 December 2010. No reason was published with any of it, and the notice text itself has not survived in a readable archived form.

Worth flagging for anyone checking this against English sources: the English Wikipedia entry for PlayOnline gives 31 December 2011 for both games. The Japanese article and the Final Fantasy XI term dictionary both say 2010, and the announcement they cite is dated September 2010. The English page is a year out.

After that New Year's Eve, Final Fantasy XI was the only game left on PlayOnline. The portal is still running today and does almost nothing except log people into that one title. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 versions were switched off on 31 March 2016.

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