Gamers Unite to Bring Back Titles Stranded by GameSpy Shutdown

Battlefield 1942. Electronic Arts

When GameSpy Technology—which hosted games such as Crysis, Battlefield 1942, and the original Halo—shut down its servers at the end of May, it left a bevy of games and gamers stranded offline. But fans are developing workarounds and setting up private hosting to keep their games going.

ModDB user Rorisup has compiled a collection of solutions, hosted on a Wiki-type article on ModDB, showing players how to get back in the game.

Solutions for at least 12 games have been found so far: For Battlefield 1942, users must install a modified .exe file to redirect their game to a new list of master servers. Halo community member btcc22 wrote a new server-browser application, which Bungie itself now hosts and supports, via an official patch.

GameSpy Technology, which was independent of the gaming site GameSpy (which was shuttered in February, 2013), started in 1997 as a host for Quake server IP addresses. IGN bought it in 2000, and ran it for more than a decade before selling to Glu Mobile Inc. in 2012. Its services included matchmaking, leaderboards, and player metrics; community features such as friends lists, messaging, and voice communication; and management tools and services for teams, guilds, and clans.

A long list of companies, including A-listers like 2k Games, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Bethesda, relied upon it. When word of the shutdown got out, many of them took steps to ensure players could stay online. Iron Galaxy, for example, patched Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike Online Edition to use a homegrown solution. Similarly, Epic Games has been phasing out GameSpy’s involvement in its games for some time.

But a side-effect of the shutdown is that many games—even if they have found a way to stay online—have lost their connection to fan-made mods. Arma 2 for example—the game upon which the massively popular Day Z mod was originally built—will stay online via Steamworks integration (a hosting service run by Valve), but its mods will be affected. Similarly, many stand-alone mods were built to use the same framework as their parent game, meaning that even if the base game has migrated to a new service, the mod creators must make a shift as well.

On the other hand, stand-alone mods are also free to set up their own hosting services. The Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality has already developed a replacement, while a solution for BF2 itself is still in the works.

To be fair, most of the games that used GameSpy’s servers are old, to say the least—Battlefield 1942 and Halo both have been around long enough to spawn 10th-anniversary collectors’ editions, for example—but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t still be playable. Take the backlash surrounding always-on DRM such as Ubisoft’s Uplay or last year’s SimCity. Players feel its bad enough when they need a constant server connection in order to play a single-player game, but even worse if they’ll be locked out if and when those servers, for whatever reason, go down.

For games where the online component is the crux of the experience, getting locked offline is effectively the same as getting locked out entirely.