baseball season is over for good

born during covid, blazeball was a bizarre text-only fantasy baseball simulator imagined as, essentially, baseball played in a world of otherworldly horrors.

i’m sorry i never played blazeballAnd now it looks like I won’t be able to reach ’cause Developer The Game Band Is Shutting It Down, the company is laying off blazeball development team and will provide them with severance pay, healthcare extension, and a dedicated staff member for job search assistance.

It was a remarkable example of procedural storytelling. blazeball Players can bet on games to win points in a given week, where there is a chance, Dungeons & DragonsGenre can separate the game, and reality itself. at the end of the week, blazeballThe community can spend their points to vote on new rules for the game, and in true D&D fashion, anything can happen. Or at least that’s what I gather from this delightful recap of what is known as the Age of Discipline:

As a quick summary of some of the highlights, The Discipline Era saw a mouth of hell that devoured the Moab desert, three giant gods in the form of a giant peanut, a giant floating microphone that could be a player’s ghost or something. And, of course, a giant squid that mostly seemed to hang out, but once tried to eat someone. A mighty Grand Slam tears apart the spacetime continuum, splitting Los Angeles into infinite parallel versions of itself, causing it to change its name from The Los Angeles Tacos to The Infinite Tacos.

After angering The Great Shield One by not respecting its idols, it casts the three most idolized players into giant peanut shells. The community somehow resurrected them, and there was some kind of supernatural financial mess?

Also it was the season of crows.

Samuel Fung produced a wonderful article for ledge Which covers the season from a player’s point of view, and it’s well worth a read.

Anyway, of its closure, blazeballThe developers said this:

its shortcoming is blazeball Not durable to run. since blazeballSince our inception, we’ve been fighting against it as much as we work to keep it blazeball True to itself while supporting the team financially and keeping its employees healthy. We’ve tried countless solutions to make it work, and we’ve come to the conclusion that this battle is not one we can win in the long run. The cost, literally and figuratively, is enormous.

blazeball developed an incredibly dedicated online fandom that even established a merchandise store full of fan-made apparel, blazeball cards (ahem… TLOPPS cards), mugs, and more, where all profits were donated to charity. The store will continue to function till June 30, 2023 and will be closed thereafter.

Looks like it had a pretty three-ish year run, and I’m sad I missed being a part of it.