There are a lot of dead MMORPGs out there. The servers for these games may be still up, but no one plays them anymore, and there’s seldom any way for new players to sign up to log onto them—but they lie dormant, waiting for old players to return, if only for just an hour.
One such game is Active Worlds, an MMO from 1995 that died ages ago. YouTuber vinesauce, who explores unusual games for his audience decided to explore the game recently. He encouraged his 6,000 live viewers to sign up for the game to play it alongside him, but none of them were able to do so.
When he logged onto the server, he believed himself to be the only one online until he ran into a character named Hitomi Fujiko. He was first under the impression that the character was nothing more than a non-player character with simple programming when it repeated the same few lines over and over.
The whole video is pretty creepy to watch and it raises questions as to whether the Hitomi Fujiko was one of the players who managed to log on at the same time as vinesauce, or whether it’s an old player of the game who just wanders around the server, waiting for new players to log on once in a blue moon.
He explains: “Considering there were close to 6,000 people watching, it’s a safe bet that many people were trying to register and join at the same time, which clusterfucked their servers, preventing any new sign ups. People were reporting that they were unable to register, so this seems very likely.”