Private Server Project Shutdown Legal Fees

Hello, you can call me Old Plissken and I'm one of the main developers for a now-defunct MMO private server project previously published online. I went by a completely different handle during development but for those of you who know me, consider this a very strange final announcement.

For those not in the know, a few years ago I joined an effort to emulate a then recently shut down MMO for a beloved series. It's a tale as old as time: devs make game, fans love game, game runs for years, power creeps, numbers dwindle, devs kill servers and fans are there to pick up the pieces. Development picked up fast and in a few short years we went from no server communication to a fully customizable and playable game using your original files or whatever client you wanted. It was arduous yet fulfilling and eventually, my job was done. ALL content was revived, we recreated features hidden in the client code that no player had ever even heard of, custom content tools were created and everything was primed for fan mods to run wild. I made sure everyone sticking around understood my mess, posted my last announcement and moved on. While I joined up for game preservation reasons, I am happy that it brought many of the players back who enjoyed the original game for so many years to enjoy several more together. This never could have happened without the love and dedication of the fans!

The servers many played on were not something the dev team was hosting nor were we administrators on them. Hosting a server was always an option for anyone so we shared some responsibility for their existence for obvious reasons. We built our server software with no knowledge of the inner workings of the original, just good old-fashioned reverse engineering, blood, sweat, tears, etc. It was a classic private server in every definition of the word, aiming to emulate communication and logic present when the game was live though we purposely excluded all monetization systems and never distributed copyright-protected files. We left it up to the server hosts and players to operate how they wanted and just fixed bugs as they were submitted to the repo. It wasn't a perfect system but it worked.

We never took steps to hide the project nor be uncooperative had we ever received a request to stop from the copyright owner, this was a fan project after all. At a certain point, we assumed they must have just not cared because "surely they have to know by now" and we even heard rumors of official server admins playing with the fans again. ALL private servers with active IPs exist in this legal gray area and anyone telling you otherwise is misinformed. That is the main message I want to get across to anyone reading this. While I won't go into the details about the legal case that is now public, copyright was ultimately infringed involving one of the hosts and the project itself was pulled in albeit indirectly. The case was amicably resolved and we took down everything we had put up without conflict. The important things to take away are that the owner was fully in the right to protect their IP and the lawsuit and project are over. Thankfully this was able to be resolved peacefully while not dealing a legal milestone blow to the larger private server community as many news outlets feared.

Game preservation is at the core of my being. I believe games are art and I wish people like me didn't need to exist. Books are reprinted. Paintings are meticulously preserved and displayed for the public. Movies are remastered, exhaustively documented and offered for fractions of a monthly streaming fee. Video games are going backward in this regard as it is effectively on the honor system that they will remain accessible. The literal erasure of a game when it's no longer beneficial to keep it available to players is a blind spot on copyright law which may never be meaningfully improved. Little wins happen from time to time like what is happening with The Internet Archive as of late but they often explicitly exclude MMOs. If a game doesn't get a full port, servers and all, it is destined to be lost to time. Don't even get me started on digital-only releases! Please do not mistake my stubbornness for altruism. What I did wasn't special and there will be countless others after me. I did it because someone had to and it turned out I could.

That all being said this did require legal fees to address. At no point during the development of the server software did anyone on the team accept any sort of compensation. This was a passion project, meaning legal fees were paid out of pocket too. While I still feel a sense of pride in my accomplishment despite never wanting legal trouble, it would be nice to not be at a net loss. Essentially if someone wants to share the burden, that would be awesome! This request only addresses me as I do not speak for anyone else involved and obviously, this is entirely a no-pressure ask. Times are tough for everyone right now but I would never claim to need this money the way others may. While I do not wish to share details of my identity which thankfully has been kept private, I am not a resident of the region where the lawsuit was brought up so I required legal counsel from both a lawyer near me as well as one near the court itself for filing and representation as needed. I completely understand if you don't want to send money to some no-name but thank you for reading regardless.

Thank you to everyone who can contribute and thank you to everyone who helped when the project was ongoing.