Video game archival is a noble act, especially in this day and age where always-online games vanish when their servers are turned off, or when niche but beloved games disappear alongside the services they’re locked to. There are libraries of indies locked to Apple Arcade, the PS Vita, and elsewhere, never to be played again; and then there’s Borderlands Online.
Borderlands Online, a Chinese free-to-play MMO developed by Shanda Games, was canceled in 2015 when the studio was shut down. It’s somewhat of a white whale for archivists, one of those projects so far out of reach as to create a sort of mythology around it. That is until recently, when a collective effort to revive a playable build has picked up steam.
To find out more I spoke to content creator, game developer, and data miner EpicNNG, the face of this archival effort to find out how exactly the project came about, the hurdles in doing so, and their hopes for the future of Borderlands Online.
“It really ‘started’ in late April. I just randomly said to my friend Let’s just do it. What if it’s out there?” EpicNNG tells me through Twitter DMs. “It was actually funny because we thought it’d be impossible – but they found a public build of it in less than 20 minutes. It didn’t feel real. From here we knew what had to be done.”