At the end of the game’s life, when the lights are going out and the developers drifting off to different positions, the most interesting thing that can be said of Perpetuum Online is that it was a minor miracle this MMO made it out the door in the first place.
One of the lead developers of this indie project posted a farewell notice on the site this week, looking back over the past 14 years of the game’s creation and operation.
“We started working on the game (then just called “GenXY”) in around 2004 — we genuinely had no idea what we were doing, we had no idea of the scope of it, we had no idea what it’d become or what we’d WANT it to become; we just had a faint idea that it was possible, and we started on it because we didn’t know better. Turns out, that was kinda really we needed to get it done — because if we would’ve known what’s coming, we probably never would’ve started.”
There are some humorous and honest anecdotes in the post, such as how a server got shut down because of a pastry and how the team was drunk during early access. Yet in the end, this statement really serves Perpetuum as a eulogy:
“It often felt like a no-win scenario, but we soldiered on, because we were desperate to make this work. There’s a delicate balance between listening enough and not listening too much, and we often missed that balance — but we always tried.”
