Ah, Asheron’s Call. We miss you. You’d have been 20 years old this month, celebrating your antique status with the likes of Ultima Online and EverQuest. But alas, you were sunsetted unjustly when Standing Stone split off from Turbine almost three years on now, and now we’re stuck mourning collectively on Reddit.
Or are we? Back in the fall of 2017, a rash of player emulators of the game were cranking up production, only to be slammed with cease-and-desist letters from Turbine’s parent company, Warner Bros. And so everyone shut everything down and gave up.
Just kidding. The game’s public Reddit suggests that there are several new player-run rogue servers underway. How are they getting away with this time? Apparently the emulator they’re built on is a “custom, completely from-scratch open source server implementation for Asheron’s Call built on C#” rather than an attempt to rip off the official servers themselves. While it’s not a sure thing that you can play in the clear, the player devs this time ’round seem to have done a much better job of shoring up the legalities and patching the things that provoked the C&Ds the last time.
Either way, we’ve rounded up some of our best pieces on the MMORPG if you’re feeling like reminiscing. Happy birthday, Asheron’s Call. You were awesome.
