Uru Live to from the dead: Revival boosts spirits at Cyan Worlds:

Spokane company Cyan Worlds announced Tuesday its groundbreaking game, Uru Live, will return from the dead and become available online by year’s end.

Cyan Worlds CEO Rand Miller said the game, meant to be introduced in 2003 but never launched online, will become part of the GameTap Network, a game portal operated by Turner Broadcasting System.

[...]

“Uru Live was ahead of its time, and now that technology has caught up with this visionary game, GameTap and Cyan are teaming up to bring it into the bold new world of broadband entertainment,” GameTap General Manager Stuart Snyder said in a press release.

After Ubisoft shut down the first version of Uru Live, Miller was forced in September 2005 to lay off about 40 Cyan workers. He said that decision was the most difficult one of his career.

Within a month, however, Turner Broadcasting had contacted Cyan to discuss a renewed commitment to the game, said Miller.

CNET: Online game rising from the dead:

Many online games have crashed and burned, but the situation with Uru is unusual in that it was the “Uru Live” community that convinced GameTap the game was worth getting behind.

That’s because the community has stayed alive and active in the two years since “Uru Live” died, mainly through an unsupported freeware program called “Until Uru” that Cyan made available to anyone who wanted to host versions of it on their own servers.

[...]

“What I found was that these players had already established a deep connection to the whole series of (‘Myst’ and ‘Uru’) games,” Pearce said. “But they’d been playing the games pretty much in isolation (prior to ‘Uru Live’). So when they came together online, they really bonded very rapidly and intensely. And when the game closed, people were just heartbroken.”

Related Links:

• Official Uru Live web site (with news and FAQ)
• Digg story

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