The Wagadu Chronicles

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

~ the obit ~

i did not personally play the wagadu chronicles. edge ai for uavs in ankara does not leave room for early-access mmorpgs on a berlin studio's roleplay-first schedule, and afrofantasy is a setting i can respect from a distance without pretending it landed on my steam library. still. so this obit is mostly researched from the outside. still.

the game came from twin drums, a berlin studio founded by allan cudicio. the pitch was an mmorpg drawn from african mythology instead of the same tolkien-plus-final-fantasy template every other mmo starts with. players picked from ancestral lineages loosely tied to real cultures like yoruba and maasai. resources came from herds without killing anything, and the whole design tilted toward roleplay rather than combat grind. the ruleset borrowed the shape of dungeons and dragons 5e.

the money came from a kickstarter that pulled in around one hundred and eighty five thousand dollars in 2020, plus a strategic investment from riot forge on top of separate german government grants. riot forge was riot games' short-lived label for third-party projects using riot ip or vision, and the wagadu chronicles was named as its first pick from an underrepresented-founders track. that program itself outlived only barely, riot shut it down in 2024 the same year the game did. by then twin drums was on a burn rate that neither the kickstarter money nor the grants could keep up with any longer. the studio announced the shutdown on 6 may 2024 (roughly). servers closed twelve days later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

the world was called wagadu after the ancient soninke empire that predates the mali empire in west african oral tradition. the map was styled as a floating archipelago of continents, each with a distinct cultural inheritance mapped to real regions the studio had researched. the design ethos was written up publicly by cudicio in essays about representation in fantasy settings, a rare thing for an mmo studio to put on record before shipping.

the mechanical spine was a d&d 5e-adjacent system with strong tabletop dna. combat was optional in a way most mmorpgs do not attempt. players could negotiate with npcs to avoid fights and spend most of a session in guild roleplay if that was the play pattern. the sandbox tools were oriented toward player-driven story rather than raid throughput.

~ how it actually ended ~

the shutdown notice from twin drums was more candid than most. cudicio wrote publicly that the studio had been fighting to stay solvent for months and had reached the end of the runway. covid aftermath and the post-zirp gaming-industry contraction were named as background factors. still. no press-release euphemism, no farewell content push (or whatever it was called).

servers closed on 18 may 2024 at 6pm cest, five months and fourteen days from the early-access launch. some of the physical kickstarter rewards were never sent because the studio no longer had the printing budget. six months later, in november 2024, twin drums answered fan requests about open-sourcing the client and said no, the codebase pulled in third-party middleware that made an open release impractical.

~ what got buried with it ~

this happened more in the european game-dev world than where i was, but the wagadu chronicles sits in a 2024 wave of mmo cancellations that never made it out of early access. [[ember-sword]] was the crypto-adjacent voxel version of the same failure shape, [[warhaven]] the nexon-korea version at a bigger scale. [[chimeraland]] closed its global servers six weeks before wagadu did. wagadu was the smallest of that group and the most singular in setting.

the piece worth remembering is that afrofantasy as a market category still has almost nothing to show for itself in 2026. the wagadu chronicles was the first major attempt at a fully-formed mmo in that space. what it left behind is a kickstarter page and the essays cudicio published while it was alive. a small community of players logged in for six months and got to see something that did not exist before and does not exist now.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »