What are lawyers good for? Pouring lemon juice on the open wounds of an MMO community desperately trying to hold on to the remnant of their closed game, apparently.
The closure of at least one Asheron’s Call emulator earlier this month was confirmed this week to be what many assumed: a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros. One of the main forces behind the emulator projects, a player named Pea, posted an account stating how he initially wrote to WB about the game’s closure and his growing involvement in the emulator scene.
Pea noted that prior the game’s shutdown, Turbine had released some information about the client that made creating emulators “significantly easier” from fans. He also assumed that WB did not care about the Asheron’s Call franchise and had abandoned it, which fed into the emulator projects taking root.
This was all squashed by the C&D notice earlier this month, which triggered a shutdown of one of the emulators, a takedown of Asheron’s Call videos detailing the project, and communication with other emulator operators about the lawyer brigade possibly heading their way.
If you’re holding out hope that this C&D means that Turbine is doing something, anything with this property, especially given that the company renewed its AC domain names earlier this year, Pea said that he has no inside info: “I have no knowledge of any intentions on their part to do anything with Asheron’s Call, and as far as I know, the contact I received was purely a standard operating procedure for a corporation concerning one of its properties, even if it logically doesn’t make sense.”
