‘Tis the season for emulators! Think back to 2002 MMORPG The Sims Online, what our own Justin Olivetti once called “an interesting failed experiment” for the genre and one of the worst-squandered IPs in online gaming. Do you miss it? Do you miss the isometric views, the typewriter grind, the weird porn chat?
Well, you can have some of that back, or will soon. A group of players released an emulator — sorry, a “reimplementation” — last weekend for the long-shuttered game called FreeSO. In fact, so many people wanted to log in and play with wallpaper and bears and toilets that they crashed the emulator, which was built for under 1000 people. DDOS attacks didn’t help either.
The developer has consequently shut down the short-lived open beta, requested help, promised particular support for the oddly large Brazilian playerbase, and put the game back into closed beta, from which he can work on super exciting things like bot detection and moderator tools while slipping out player invites and increasing server capacity incrementally.
FreeSO’s developers say that they’re entirely in the clear from legal entanglements.
“The FreeSO client does not display any copyrighted material, and is not distributed with it,” explains the website. “The game files are provided by the user, and the client simply reads the files the user provides. In this sense, our replacement client is essentially a glorified The Sims Online™ file reader, as all original graphics, sounds, UI layouts and game objects are simply read and simulated by the client. The game server transmits metadata generated from the execution of these scripts (avatar money values, lot/object state, avatar appearances, hash of game files for version identification) but does not transmit any copyrighted material either.”
Even if they’re wrong, EA has turned a blind eye to Ultima Online private shards for nearly two decades, so don’t expect much of a crackdown here. Anyone wanna come grind typewriting with me?
