Hellgate: London Hellgate London News

"It all began about four years ago. A young team, peppered with the most famous guys of the ARPG business, introduced their new project Hellgate: London. Fans all over the world got more and more excited about what Flagship Studios worked on. Communities like HellgateLondon.de formed and thousands of people looked forward to play Hellgate: London.

Then in October 2007, the game was released, and a great voyage through London began. Even if Hellgate wasn’t perfect at that time, fans loved it and appreciated Flagship's hard work on improving the game. After a long wait, the Stonehenge Chronicles went online, full of new environments, new assets such as pets and a lot of new daemons. It was incredible! Patch 2.0 was supposed to be the next milestone in the history of Hellgate London. There would be even more incredible environments, more assets, skills, PvP, a bunch of fresh features and more visually compelling daemons. Everyone hoped that the Abyss-Chronicles are online as fast as possible.

However, in the summer of 2008 Flagship Studios crashed after the game finally started to grow to what it was meant to be: Something new in the WoW
controlled online gaming business. The reasons for the failure are as
manifold as the game itself. The asperation to work as an independent
company was one of the reasons for a bad start after release. Flagship studios felt the pressure to release a game that could compete with all the features of the big MMOs. Trying to implement too many game modes caused for some of them to not function properly. Overall Hellgate is an innovative game with the most ardent
community the world has ever seen. A community, that now cannot play the
online mode of its favourite game!

After the server shutdown on January 31st, 2009, there’s only one thing left for us to say:

We, the fans in Europe and North America are really disappointed about this situation and Namco’s decision of keeping the publishing rights for EU/US. We are contemplating the reasons for that. Is it because Namco is thinking about a revival of the HG:L Universe or they simply want keep it in case they ever want to release HG:L 2?

After the Hellgates closed in Europe and North America, HanbitSoft is still trying to make HG:L successful and the signs on the Asian horizon are looking pretty good. And when reviewing the Asian gaming world the potentials are definately there. New content and many new features are about to launch on the Korean servers.

We, the European and American Hellgate communities, asking you Namco, and whoever else might be a decision maker about the Publishing Rights. Please think about all the fans who are dying to get Hellgate back online. We believe that we are talking for the majority of the community when we say: „We don’t need any lifetime subscriptions but give us the chance to play HG:L again. Get HanbitSoft in the boat, use their subscription system for HG:L and the fans will be pleased to get their beloved game back. The singleplayer mode is nice but the real exciting part is the multiplayer part without it HG:L is doomed.
Please consider giving HanbitSoft the Publishing Rights to be able to release
Hellgate in EU/US again. We are sure there are ways to harmonize the financial interests of all factions, and much more important: Pleasing the interests and dreams of thousand fans and players all over the world.

Hanbitsoft and Namco Bandai, we are asking you: Please meet each other and try to come to an agreement that meets the interest of the fans! We are looking forward to your reply.

The Hellgate London Community"