After news came out that one of the fundamental technologies powering the web was compromised, the internet, for a brief moment, ground to a halt. Almost every major company announced immediate emergency maintenance to patch a newly-discovered PHP exploit that could allow hackers to execute code on any website running this code-base (estimated to power roughly 70 percent of the internet). Almost 24 hours later, many sites and services are back online. In Japan, however, some services running on older, depreciated software are finding the task of updating these outdated systems impossible, forcing them into permanent, immediate closure.
Two of the oldest mobile games still online will now be forced to permanently shutter operations because the older technology powering these services is unable to be updated to address the exploit. One is World Quest, which first launched on the Japanese mobile service GREE in 2011 as a social travel game where players could create their own avatars and virtually visit various countries and landmarks via their phones. Simulating the experience of travel, the app used open-source online maps to bring the experience to life and subsequently became beloved with Japanese audiences. After initially shutting down in 2019, it was revived in 2020 exactly as it once was to allow people to travel when borders were closed during COVID-19. It had remained active again until now.
That revived service has now been abruptly closed, citing an inability to take the necessary measures to secure customer information due to aging systems. Since the game was revived in 2020 using the same code that powered the game since 2011, no new updates for the game had been released, but it has maintained an active player base over the last six years. Japanese players have reacted to the news by nostalgically reminiscing on their time playing the game and thanking the development team for their service until this point.
A text-based community RPG titled Save My Demonic World was also forced to close this week as a result of the new security vulnerability. It’s in a similar boat where its aging systems after ending updates to the game two years ago can’t accommodate the necessary fixes. The internet can be fragile!
Many old websites and services that are no longer being actively updated (or may simply be too old to receive the update, as was the case for these two games) are now at risk of permanently going offline. Such an event would lock swathes of the old internet from public view, including bits that were already beginning to break down and become inaccessible. These games are two of the more high-profile examples of that, and they serve as a warning for just how much of the history of the internet risks being lost in the fallout of the disclosure of these security vulnerabilities.