Word of the secret City of Heroes server-run by a group calling themselves the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers, or SCORE for short- first got out last week thanks to a now-deleted video by a player named Destroyer Stroyer.įor six years, the video said, a few thousand die-hard City of Heroes fanatics had been able to keep playing the beloved game despite its official shutdown, thanks to the server. In this era of “ Avengers,” “ Endgames,” and “Robert Downey Jrs,” fans are all the more saddened that their favourite game didn’t survive to see superheroes turn pop culture into their personal playground.

In 2012, publisher NCSoft closed City of Heroes developer Paragon Studios as part of a “realignment of company focus.” Paragon fought to keep the game alive until the bitter end, but to no avail.

Though its popularity dwindled over time, diehard fans stuck around through countless ups and downs. Surrounded by an elven forest of self-serious fantasy MMOs, it brought some much-needed colour to the scene with a burst of high-flying comic-book action.

When it was released in 2002, there was nothing else like it. In the wake of that server’s discovery last week, the City of Heroes community has been thrown into chaos.Ĭity of Heroes was an MMO in which everybody played as their own custom-made superhero-or villain, after the City of Villains expansion. For six years, it was kept alive by fans on a secret private server. It turns out that when superhero MMO City of Heroes was shut down at the end of 2012, it was only mostly dead.

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