The Fall Of Earthrise

You're probably in trouble if Richard Cobbett hasn't heard of you. When I mentioned to him that Earthrise, a sci-fi based MMO, had closed its servers, he responded with a dismissive shrug, trying to casually hide his missing knowledge in a stance of indifference. But I spotted a bead of sweat forming on his forehead, and knew that Masthead's MMO's failure to make an impact with him had truly damned it.

The servers were shut off yesterday after a year online.

The candid remarks of Atanas Atanasov, Director of Masthead Studios, brought the game to an end.

One year after the launch of the game, we have decided to stop the Earthrise servers. Earthrise was released too early and did not meet the expectations of its fans. We did our best to revive the game in 2011, but the time was not enough to keep up with the user requirements. There is a huge interest in high quality open world sandbox MMORPGs, unfortunately the big publishers do not show any interest in the genre. It is unfortunate that low budget companies like ours are trying to bring innovativeness in the already saturated MMO market. I hope that one day an independent studio will be able to release the long anticipated open world sandbox MMO, which everyone is talking about, but no one is making. We tried, but did not succeed. We would like to apologize to those who were disappointed from Earthrise and to thank everyone who supported us during the years.

There's the small hope of a free-to-play version resurrecting it, but that too requires publisher intervention. But if APB can come back, then there's always hope. Here's the intro sequence, to see if it jogs Rich's memory .