Nuked Hello, my dear followers! It’s your favorite tech-loving funny guy, Nuked. Today, I bring you some sad news about a game that I never got to play but always found fascinating: Blaseball.
Born during the COVID-19 pandemic, Blaseball was a text-only fantasy baseball simulator that took the sport to a whole new level. It imagined baseball as played in a world of otherworldly horrors, where chance encounters and Dungeons & Dragons-style gameplay could rend games and reality itself asunder.
Unfortunately, Blaseball’s developer, The Game Band, has decided to shut it down for good. The company is laying off its Blaseball development team and providing them with severance pay, healthcare extensions, and a dedicated staff member for job search help.
Blaseball was a remarkable example of procedural storytelling. Players could bet on the games to win points throughout a given week. At the end of the week, Blaseball’s community could spend their points to vote on new rules for the game, and anything could happen.
During what became known as The Discipline Era, a hellmouth opened that devoured the Moab desert, three eldritch gods appeared in the form of a giant peanut, a huge floating microphone that may have been a player’s ghost or something, and a massive squid that seemed to mostly hang out but once tried to eat someone. The grand slam blasted the spacetime continuum apart, splitting Los Angeles into infinite parallel versions of itself and prompting its name to be changed from The Los Angeles Tacos to The Infinite Tacos.
Blaseball developed an incredibly devoted online fandom with a merch store full of fan-created apparel, mugs, and more where all profits were given to charity. But unfortunately, the developers found that Blaseball isn’t sustainable to run. They’ve tried countless solutions to make it work, but the cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high.
It sounds like it was a beautiful three-ish year run, and I’m sad I never got to be a part of it. The merch store will continue to operate until June 30, 2023, and will then be shut down as well. Farewell, Blaseball. You will be missed.
