Lost worlds

You can listen to the albums of your youth on iTunes or on the original cd or vinyl, you can read the books you read at school and you can even play the games you played in the 90's as roms or even on the original systems if you can find them.

What you can't do is experience the media that you may have sunk hours into over the years- there's no way you can fight demons in London's underground stations. You can't explore the alien worlds of Tablo Rasha and you can't travel beyond the dome of York.

You can play super Mario world even after the snes stopped being made, you can play pac-man or Robocop vs terminator outside the arcade on MAME via your PC. But what do you do when you want to play an MMO once the servers have gone dark?

No matter how big your customer base is, how many servers you have in how many countries, at some point even the mighty WOWs doors will close and Azeroth will be just another useless atlas in a charity shop pound box.

So, in 20 years time when we get a nostalgia trend for 2010 games to down load to our PS15s or the Dreamcast 360 (don't look at me like that, its going to happen!)  are we going to get to enter Necrons future cities for second time? are we going to be able experience what wow was the first time round- before the horror that was Pandaria?

Could it be taken one step further? could you log on in 2035 and continue with your level 110 Human Deathknight and continue the grind for epic loot and mounts?

There's some very dedicated people on the net who keep some of the closed MMOs going via private severs- these multiplayer heroes keep the matrix stocked with red pills, let wow continue to be hard as nails (guns need ammo, raids need 40+ members and take 5 hours and the dead mines have Van Cleef at the end and not Cookie!!!) and ensure Hellgate continues to trash London.

Perhaps retro games need to be self contained units that don't rely on online memberships or components, the recent Halo retro game Master chief collection's online has been rife with connection errors and multiplayer problems- god knows what online issues a redux of an 2005 mmo would have.

Maybe its best to leave their outdated mechanics and grind heavy gameplay in the past and remember the offline classics like uncharted and the last of us.