UberStrike

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

~ the last words ~

Cmune was eighteen people, founded in Beijing in March 2007 by Ludovic Bodin and Shaun Lelacheur Sales, with a second office in San Francisco. In November 2008 they shipped Paradise Paintball, which has a decent claim to being the first real-time 3D multiplayer game to run inside Facebook and inside MySpace. It also sat at number one worldwide on Apple's Dashboard for four months after launch, which is a chart nobody remembers existing.

The money followed quickly. On 28 May 2009 Paradise Paintball was picked as one of the winners of the fbFund, Facebook's incubator with Accel Partners and the Founders Fund. MySpace gave it Best New App at GDC in March 2010. Atomico and DCM put money in. It was also pitched as the first 3D browser game with real-time micropayments, meaning you could buy a weapon skin without leaving the match, a thing which now sounds like the default and in 2009 was a selling point worth a press release.

The rename to UberStrike came in late 2010 and the game grew into its best years from there. By November 2012 it was the largest first-person shooter on Facebook. It ran in a browser tab on Windows and Mac, got a standalone site, and arrived on the Mac App Store and on iPad as UberStrike HD. There was a forum where players ran clan threads, arranged training and sold each other signature art.

Cmune posted the end on the game's own homepage on 13 April 2016, under the word SUNSETTING, and shut the servers down on 13 June. Two months of notice is more than most browser games got. The company kept going without it, shipped a mobile shooter called DeadHeads in May 2017 that reused maps lifted straight out of UberStrike, started a battle royale called UltraHunt in 2018 that never got past closed pre-alpha, and took $1.4 million from Starbreeze to work on a mobile PAYDAY. Cmune itself closed in 2020.

~ the record ~

~ the plugin underneath ~

A 3D shooter in a browser tab in 2010 meant a plugin, and the whole category that UberStrike belonged to was standing on technology the browser vendors spent the next few years removing. Games like this did not get outcompeted so much as they lost their floor: Chrome dropped the plugin architecture these things needed, and the replacement that was supposed to catch them never had the same install base to land on. UberStrike's death date sits right inside that window.

~ what it was instead of ~

My shooter years were 2002 to 2005, in Turkish internet cafes, playing Counter-Strike on machines somebody else maintained, paying by the hour. UberStrike was built for the person who did not have that: no install and no cafe, just a tab you could open on a work laptop. That is a different product even though the screenshots look similar, and it explains why it did so well on Facebook and never mattered at all to anyone who already had a machine and a server to play on.

~ the domain ~

For years after the shutdown uberstrike.com stayed up serving nothing but the notice, which is how Wikipedia came to cite the dead homepage as a source for its own death. It has since gone fully dark, along with cmune.com. The Steam page for the game redirects to the store's front door, the standard signal that a title has been delisted rather than simply left unsold. Fans run a patched client against their own servers now, which keeps the game playable and does not make it alive.

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