vSide

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

~ the obit ~

When vside was full of teenagers standing around a virtual dj booth, i was a grown engineer running around ultima online private shards. Different room of the same building. vside was a virtual world for a younger crowd and a very specific vibe, music and the apartment you decorated, and it was never going to be my shard.

Doppelganger, Inc. built it and launched it around 2007. The whole world ran on music, staff-curated dj sets you could stand in and dance to. In 2009 a company called ExitReality bought it. The most-remembered change after that was that the licensed music went away and got replaced with shoutcast radio streams, which is the small detail regulars always hold onto, the moment the soundtrack changed under them.

ExitReality, by most accounts, bought vside and then did very little with it. The game reportedly never turned a profit even under doppelganger. It coasted for most of a decade on inertia and the people who stayed. Around may 2018 it simply stopped working. No shutdown post, no goodbye, no thirty days notice. The servers went and that was the news.

I have said goodbye to a game world before, on the uo shards that closed one by one, and there is always some kind of last night. vside did not even get that. It is the quieter and sadder version of a virtual-world death, not a scheduled funeral but a landlord who stops paying the electric bill. One day the club is just dark, and the people who used to meet there find the door does not open.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the slow off-switch ~

Some virtual worlds die on a date, with a countdown and a farewell event and a final screenshot everyone keeps. vside died the other way. An acquirer that had stopped caring, a game that never made money, and a userbase small enough that no press release was worth writing. The lights went out around may 2018 and the only record is players comparing notes afterward about when exactly they last got in. A death with no coroner.

~ what the regulars remember ~

Ask anyone who was there and the memory is not the graphics or the apartments. It is the music. For its best years vside was a place you went to hear a set and be around other people hearing it, closer to a club than a game. When exitreality pulled the licensed tracks and dropped in radio streams, something of the original went with them. The world kept running for years after that, but the people who loved it will tell you it had already half-ended the day the music changed.

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