MMO are a strange means of facilitating games because they are supposedly dead on arrival. Not dead in the sense of “lol dead game”, this is exactly the comment you see in the comments to articles, videos, etc. about literally any online game, no matter how popular it is. Dead in the sense that it will die like everything else, because one day the servers will go down and there will no longer be a (legal) way to play it. I put legality in brackets here because there are plenty of fan efforts out there that allow you to play a number of “officially” dead MMOs, but what would a Frankensteinian revival of such a thing look like? Likely, Gorgon Garden.
As for Gorgon's Garden, we go back to 2008, oddly enough, personally, I've probably spent time playing MMOs regularly in the last year. It's a random summer day and you're browsing Hypogeum.net, a reanimated version of it, a fictional forum anyway, dedicated to an MMO called Gorgon's Garden, now defunct due to most of the game being sealed with a digital currency that no longer exists.
In practice, the game is not a “Gorgon's Garden” game, but a “Gorgon's Garden” game. It's you sitting at your computer in what looks like a family computer room – you can see the edges of the computer screen, hints of the room beyond the bevels, revealed fully in the reflection as the screen goes dark. You can browse this fake forum, read lewd messages from people of all ages, learn juicy details about their lives and, importantly, find a tool from a notorious hacker that bypasses this dead digital currency. The world of the Gorgon's Garden will open before you again.
Basically it's pretty simple: you can only look left or right, but you can move in any direction. Attacks are limited to a sword swing and one spell, and as you kill enemies you level up, which doesn't do much but increase your health.
As you get further and further into the game (or perhaps “dive” is the right word) it begins to fall apart, the forum acting as a hub of secrets, pushing you further down the rabbit hole. What starts out as something silly escalates into something actually a little disturbing, and I'll leave it at that because it's all short and free, and given the season, there's little reason not to try it out for yourself.
If you need some extra convincing, Gordon's Garden is partly owned by Feverdream Johnny, the developer of one of my favorite games. weird platformers Orbo's Odyssey. Go ahead, try it, remind yourself of the horrors of niche forums and your favorite dead MMO, there's no better time for this. You can pick it up at Itch.io.
