First Sole Survivor Servers in 20 Years In Development

On 1 January 2002, official Sole Survivor servers on (the now also former) Westwood Online were shut down, leaving the series’ first multiplayer-centric title without a way to play online. Only repetitive 15-minute deathmatches against AI opponents have been available to us since then.

A small group of community members (OmniBlade, CCHyper, tomsons26) have taken it upon themselves to create some sort of alternative that would allow fans to play this game online and even experience the game modes that have been scarcely mentioned or documented. Currently, development is still ongoing and the tester pool is small (including some of the players who were part of the Sole Survivor community back in the day!), but there have already been livestreams by Jarmo and PapasNowPro as early as two weeks ago that can give you a taste of what the game truly looks like.

While there is no strict timeframe for wider community access, the team did announce that they are planning to let more people in once they are satisfied with the stability and performance of their project. Truly great news for game historians, as whatever one may think of titles like this, we will soon be able to fully understand Sole Survivor and gain yet another argument on why relying solely on proprietary servers is a horrible, short-sighted decision that has taken more than one game from its audience…