World of Speed

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

~ the obit ~

The servers went off on 25 December 2018. Notice had gone up on the Steam page six weeks earlier, on 13 November, and the date picked for the end was Christmas Day, when nobody was going to be reading announcements about a racing game with a few hundred players left in it.

World of Speed was announced on 10 February 2014 by Slightly Mad Studios, the London outfit Ian Bell assembled in January 2009 from the assets of the bankrupt Blimey! Games, and known at the time for Need for Speed: Shift. The pitch was a team-based online racer, free to play, with roughly fifty licensed cars and circuits traced over real streets in London and Moscow. My.com, the international face of Russia's Mail.Ru Group, was publishing it.

It did not arrive in 2014, and it did not arrive in the two years after that. In January 2017 the community forums were shut with a note saying the game was not yet good enough for its players and needed substantial revision. When it did reach Steam early access on 22 August 2017, the store page credited Saber Interactive and Redemption Ark as the developers and a company called Mad Dog Games LLC as the publisher. Slightly Mad's name is not on it anywhere.

The Need for Speed name reaches back to the internet cafe years for me. World of Speed I met in a list of dead servers, which is roughly where anybody is going to meet it now.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the 2014 pitch ~

What was described in February 2014 was closer to a sport than a racing game. Players would join clubs, and a race was meant to be scored on what you contributed to your club rather than on who crossed the line first. Slightly Mad had a decent claim to be able to build it, having done the handling model for two Need for Speed games and being halfway through Project CARS at the time.

That second project is the uncomfortable comparison. Project CARS was funded directly by its own players through Slightly Mad's World of Mass Development portal and shipped in May 2015. It sold well enough to justify a sequel in 2017 and a third game after that. The free-to-play racer with the Russian publisher sat in development through the whole of it.

~ handed off ~

The January 2017 forum closure is the clearest thing anybody involved ever said about the game. Somewhere after that the work moved to Saber Interactive, a studio with a long history of finishing other people's projects, and the version that reached Steam in August 2017 was Saber's. It arrived as a paid early access title rather than the free-to-play service that had been announced, which tends to mean the revenue model was rewritten after the audience estimate came down.

Slightly Mad walked away intact. Codemasters bought the studio in November 2019 for around thirty million dollars, mostly for Project CARS, and Bell went on to Fast & Furious Crossroads. My.com kept publishing other people's shooters. Nobody was left holding World of Speed except the people who had bought into it.

~ what is still on steam ~

App 623880 has not been deleted. Query it today and the store API answers with a release date of 22 August 2017 and a publisher called Mad Dog Games LLC, a name that exists mainly on this one record. The genre tags still read Massively Multiplayer and Racing. There is nothing at the other end.

Sixteen months of servers came out of nearly five years of development and three separate development teams. The screenshots survive because Valve does not throw them away.

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