Hellgate: London – we hardly knew ye.

As an MMO you were announced with much pomp and circumstance, a FPS – brawler set in a dystopian cyperpunk London where demons arose to turn the Britain metropolis into a romper-room for the nefarious powers.

Alas, it was not to be.

While I and my fellow gamers rejoiced in the freshly wrought game and the manner in which you presented it, something was amiss. I did not begrudge the amount of time it cut into my World of Warcraft. If anything, I celebrated it. WoW had become a stale, flaccid diversion. Hellgate looked promising. Hellgate looked provocative.

Hellgate looked devilishly good.

Unfortunately those in charge of your better angels forswore your development, and while 50 managers shouted and berated five techies working hours that would exhaust an Egyptian slave, the game foundered under the immense strain that was the creative ego. In the end, the game was besieged by a very different set of devils – those in management, ensconced in ivory towers.

The signs were easy to see if you were an avid player. Glitches increased, content updates were lackluster, and servers went down more often then my ex for a nickel of blow.

And that’s the shame, really. Because it was an artfully wrought intellectual property, a game forged with ingenious ideas that thrilled the imagination and enraptured the senses, for this was – or would have been – proof that there are other MMO’s available that do not require elves, tights, and reliving the worst moments spent at a Renaissance Pleasure Fair.

For nothing else Hellgate: London, I salute you and your stalwart team of grunt devs and techies for your mindful application of one’s and zero’s to make a game that challenged a genre beholden to a single motif that stood apart from the clones that now besiege our credit cards.

You were ahead of your time and died much, much too young. You will be missed.

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