These Developers Are Bringing Canceled Game Concord Back To Life

Concord, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios' Overwatch-like shooter, was live for just two weeks before it was pulled offline. Though Concord certainly had some dedicated players, it didn't have many—which is why it may be surprising to hear that a group of players are reverse-engineering the game and its servers to bring it back to life.

Publisher Sony removed Concord from stores and digital marketplaces, automatically refunded some, and, later, shut down Firewalk Studios. Two hundred or so people were laid off, and any hopes of Concord's return were dashed. Poor sales—estimated to be under 25,000 copies sold—and low player numbers marred the release. Firewalk Studios' game director Ryan Ellis said in a blog post that pieces of the game "resonated with players," but "other aspects of the game and [Concord's] initial launch didn't land the way [Firewalk Studios] intended."

Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players. Now, a group of three hobbyist reverse-engineers, who go by real, Red, and gwog online, are trying to make it playable again. They explained the process to Aftermath in an interview over Discord. 

"I just like the virtual equivalent of taking things apart and putting them together," gwog said.

The group got a build of Concord running this week and posted a video of the match on YouTube. Red, who led a project to bring LawBreakers back online, said it was the first time he'd played Concord. When Red heard the game had died, he sought it out. 

"I pretty much always do this when games die," he said. "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 said there are two ways to reverse engineer a game like this and have it run on a server. He used a method that turned the game into its own server. Red said most games and game 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."

Concord used an anti-tamper software to keep people from cheating, which also creates a problem for people reverse engineering. It's "nearly impossible" to crack, Red said, so the group didn't—they found an exploit to "forcefully decrypt the game's code" to "restore the game and start working on servers." Red said he started working on reverse engineering Concord as soon as the game went down, but the team was stuck for a long time on the anti-tamper software. Most of the progress, he said, took place over the past two months.

Real, who had never worked on a reverse engineering project before but recreated the backend API, said this work "feels like 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."

Friday morning, a video of the playtest was posted to the Concord Reddit page. The Discord channel, where people can learn more about future private playtests has grown quickly; hundreds of people have joined for a chance to play Concord again. It's not open to the public, but people can sign up for future tests. Even former Firewalk Studios employees have joined the server. They're excited to see Concord come back to life, too, the developers said. 

Red, who is passionate about game preservation and the Stop Killing Games movement, said the next step is adding Concord to a platform he created to host dead games, called Ancify. 

"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. Radical Heights, Hyenas, and LawBreakers are all on there now, in different states of functionality. There's no exact timeline for the addition of Concord but Red said to expect it “soon.”.

"I think a big part of [reverse engineering] is just being curious and motivated," Real said. "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."

And for the people questioning why Concord, Red had a message. 

"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."