Against all odds, a team of dedicated fans is resurrecting Concord, the canceled shooter from Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios.* This is a story of passion, technical skill, and a refusal to let a game fade into oblivion. Concord, an Overwatch-like title, was pulled offline just weeks after its launch, leaving many players disappointed.
Sony's decision to remove Concord from digital stores, issue refunds, and ultimately shut down Firewalk Studios seemed to spell the end. With estimated sales under 25,000 copies and low player numbers, the game's fate was sealed. Firewalk Studios' game director, Ryan Ellis, acknowledged that while some aspects of Concord resonated with players, the overall launch didn't meet expectations.
But here's where it gets interesting: Despite the game's demise, a group of three reverse-engineering hobbyists, known online as real, Red, and gwog, are determined to bring Concord back to life. They shared their journey with Aftermath, offering insights into the complex process.
"I just like the virtual equivalent of taking things apart and putting them together," explained gwog.
The team managed to get a playable build of Concord up and running, even sharing a video of their progress on YouTube. Red, who previously led a project to revive LawBreakers, was drawn to Concord after hearing of its cancellation.
"I pretty much always do this when games die," Red stated. "There's also part of it that is due to the technical challenge that Concord brings with it, it's probably the most complex project I've worked on so far, and that really motivated me to keep going."
Red detailed the two main approaches to reverse-engineering a game for server functionality. The team utilized a method that essentially turned the game itself into its own server. He noted that most games and servers share code.
"Sometimes there's enough of the server left in the game, that we can 'activate' that code and make the game believe it's a server," Red said. "We do pretty much always need to fill in the gaps though, that involves a 'trying to find a needle in a haystack' approach of just trying to find something that doesn't exist, and recreating it. This is typically the most challenging part of these projects."
One significant hurdle was Concord's anti-tamper software, designed to prevent cheating. This software proved incredibly difficult to crack. Instead of cracking the code, the team found an exploit to "forcefully decrypt the game's code" to "restore the game and start working on servers." Red emphasized that the majority of their progress occurred in the last two months, after overcoming the anti-tamper software.
Real, who tackled the backend API, described the work as "building something without the instructions."
"Sometimes you have a picture of what it's supposed to be," he said. "Sometimes you only have the pieces. You slowly (or sometimes if you get lucky, quickly) build it up until it looks exactly like (or close enough to) the metaphorical picture of what it's supposed to be. I worked on a lot of the backend server elements, think of them like save data. It contains stuff like what items you have unlocked, what level you are and how much XP you have."
The project's progress has already generated excitement. A video of the playtest was posted on the Concord Reddit page, and the Discord channel for future private playtests has quickly gained hundreds of members, including former Firewalk Studios employees.
This raises an important question: why go to all this effort? For Red, it's a matter of game preservation. He's also passionate about the Stop Killing Games movement. The next step is integrating Concord into Ancify, a platform he created to host dead games.
"It's intended to serve as a platform for dead games so that several games can share authentication, matchmaking, server deployment, and other such infrastructure to prevent us from having to put in duplicate work for each project," he said.
Real added, "I'm very interested in 'lost media' and the like so I initially gravitated towards Concord because of the very large wave it made online as well as its incredibly short lifespan. Over the course of the project I began to respect a lot of the design choices I initially questioned and I think that also motivated me to keep working on it. I think part of it is wanting other people to see what I saw."
This dedication highlights a significant issue in the gaming industry: the ephemeral nature of digital games. What happens when the servers shut down? The game, and the community that loved it, can disappear.
Red's message to those questioning the project is simple: "I just hope people can be respectful about this. Regardless of whether someone likes the game or not, there'll always be people liking a specific game, and you never know, the game you like might be the one dying next."
What are your thoughts on this effort? Do you think it's important to preserve games, even if they weren't commercially successful? Share your opinions in the comments below!
