Hands up: Did any of you play a game called Infantry Online back in the day? And by “back in the day,” we mean “1999?” This was a 2-D isometric MMO shooter that was developed by the same studio that made SubSpace and published by Sony Online Entertainment.
While SOE kept the game up and running for well over a decade, the studio shut down Infantry Online’s servers back in March 2012. That wasn’t the end of this game’s history, however, as the community picked up the title and created an emulator called Free Infantry so that those with twitchy fingers and a penchant for high-tech battles could get their fix.
“With Sony Online Entertainment shutting the servers down, Free Infantry has brought the community back together in full. Today, we finance, maintain and grow Infantry Online into a bigger and better game,” said the community team. “To this end, Free Infantry has open-sourced the entire server infrastructure required to host the zones, and provides all the tooling that you require to build your own zones.”
Infantry Online is more than a dumb shooter; it features fog of war, Newtonian physics, and specific zones with their own game modes such as capture-the-flag and bug hunt. If that wasn’t enough, there is also a mode that allows players to jump into spaceships to duke it out in a fleet battle.
