The Ill-Fated Hellgate: London Is Shutting Down Again

Hellgate: London was one of a very small number of MMOs that have received a second chance. The instance-heavy, dungeon-crawling shooter was originally launched on October 31, 2007 by its developer, Flagship Studios, to extremely modest reception. The original game required a box fee and offered an optional subscription. It simply didn't stack up to other games of similar price points. Having had another MMO called Mythos in development alongside Hellgate, this reception was not enough to keep the company afloat. Flagship shut the game down in January of 2009 before closing due to bankruptcy.

HanbitSoft, a subsidiary of T3 Entertainment announced that they had acquired both ill-fated games on November 3, 2008. The Korean developer would be redeg Hellgate to be a free-to-play game while simultaneously finishing development on Mythos and releasing it for the first time. Hellgate relaunched in the West on June 30, 2011 by Redbana, a "sister company" of T3 Entertainment through the T3Fun portal. Mythos launched a short time before that, on April 12, 2011. Frogster shut the servers down on October 27, 2011 and Redbana announced that a global open beta would begin on Februrary 2, 2012 via the T3Fun portal. It lasted less than two years and closed on January 22, 2014. Those of us that had been given the privilege of playing in the Flagship alpha could see that something big had changed. Its overall feel was not that of the game we had known only briefly before Flagship shut down. The rest likely felt the game was insubstantial in some way.

Now, Hellgate is following its younger sibling in closing for a second time. Its second lease on life was not enough. The resurrected Hellgate Global was called "pay-to-win" and "a cash grab," among other similar descriptors. It was hosted on the less popular T3Fun portal and, despite being greenlit in September of last year, the game never made a Steam debut. The use of GameGuard drove others away. Personally, as someone who played from alpha through to release and again when the free-to-play launch happened, much like Mythos, something other than the business model had changed. It lost some of the spark it once had.

The servers will be open until December 31. If you would like to get one last crawl in before it's gone for good, you can do so via T3Fun. The cash shop was disabled over a month ago.

Hellgate was ill-fated until the end. In its time, it broke free of the genre's accepted scope, but it simply wasn't enough.