Rewind a little more than a year and a half... the game was closing down. My son, about 3.5 years old, and my daughter, then a little more than 6, sat down with me to enjoy the last few weeks of the game. We made about a dozen characters (for some reason, all Huge body type) and ran the starting missions in Praetoria. They got to know about offensive and defensive powers, learning attacks from Dark Melee and shields from Fiery Aura. After the game shut down, we actually ran a few missions "live", with me playing the part of both the contact and the big bad boss.
Eventually, we ran out of steam on that, and City of Heroes (or "Fireman" as the kids called it, as their favorite characters all used Fire in some way) started to fade from our memories. Or so I thought.
Yesterday, I was playing something else on my desktop computer, and my son, now 5, remembered "Fireman". "We could play that game instead," he told me, an excited gleam in his eye.
"Actually," I said sadly, "we can't. They stopped making the game, so it won't run anymore."
"Even if it doesn't play, we could look at the guys," my son pleaded.
"I don't think that will work," I said, and proved it by trying to launch the game. Sure enough it complained of unreachable servers and crashed immediately afterwards. "They'd have to start running more computers somewhere else," I explained. "At this point, they'd probably have to build it again from scratch."
"But you run computers! At work!" My son's face lit up at this thought.
"Yes, but we don't make this game at my job. And even if we did, it would take, I dunno, five years for us to rebuild it."
"You just have to get a different job! Then you can go to work and build Fireman again!"
"Uh..."
"And in five years I will be ten years old!" (My son the mathematician.) "When I am ten years old I can play Fireman again!"
I went by the old offices of Paragon Studios today, thinking about all this. It's still empty; more than eighteen months later they haven't found replacement tenants. Part of me thinks, Hell, yeah, get the band back together. The front meeting room is still labeled Justice. But realistically, I'm not in a position to ditch my job to chase this particular dream. At least, not right now.
I tell you what, though: When my son is ten years old, I'll teach him how to write code. If he's still interested, we may try our hand at doing something that captures some of the magic of CoH.
Peace.
- Mind Forever Burning
