A Blank Slate once more

So you probably never heard of the game Tabula Rasa, as it's an MMO called something other than World of Warcraft.

Don't worry, hardly anyone else ever heard of it either, despite it being marketed by Lord British himself (Richard Garriott, Ultima), which is why it's shutting down tomorrow night. Nobody played. Hell, Garriott even went into space as a sort of publicity stunt for the game. Still nobody played. You can't beat Blizzard.

Anyhow, the only reason I bring this up is that instead of just quietly shutting down the servers and telling subscribers to fuck off, they haven't been charging them to play for the last 3 or 4 months. They just ran it free of monthly fees, as everyone knew that it was dying. And well, at 8 pm tomorrow (4 hours before the servers quiesce), they've invited everyone to the last battle. Every player in the world will be part of it, and it'll apparently be epic in scope, as a sort of "goodbye" to the (apparently small) player base.

Details can be found here.

I don't know. I guess I'm a sucker for sentimentality, and this reeks of it. I'd at least try out any project that this team was responsible for in the future, as I like how they handled this a great deal. Sometimes you learn more about people by how they handle failure than how well they win, and if I knew what I know now about this team, I'd have played the game even if it sucked, which it probably does.

RIP Tabula Rasa.