Despite the work of game preservationists, some games just disappear into the memory of the internet, most never to return. One such game was the Facebook-based creature collector Miscrits–that is, until a small band of dedicated fans decided that the game needed to live again.
Project lead GK, as well as some of the Miscrits fans in the revival’s Discord, spoke to Game Rant about their love of the game, why it needed to be revived for a modern audience, and about the new version currently in alpha.
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Miscrits Used to Be a Facebook Titan
In its heyday, Facebook had a lively scene of small, sometimes experimental, games that had a social element. Games like Farmville were everywhere, and even major companies explored the scene with EA launching a Dragon Age tie-in title on the platform. Amid this, a colorful and interesting experience named Miscrits made a place for itself.
Gamers grew up on these titles, and Miscrits in particular was a popular pastime on Facebook. Built on the basic principles of the creature collector model made famous by Pokemon, Miscrits offered a bright environment and a more simplified and streamlined experience than its more well-known Nintendo-based cousin. This made it feel more accessible and attainable to many gamers, who would join with others to find the next Miscrit. Because Facebook games leaned hard on social integration, players could join various formal or informal structures and even form their own competitive leagues.
Until, one day, it stopped. And that began GK’s journey.
As a child, I loved
Miscrits
very much. My older brother showed them to me and we played together. Then, one day, I tried to log into my favorite game, but I couldn’t. From that moment on, I wanted to try to restore
Miscrits
. I defend that
Miscrits
is a unique game into which they put a lot of work. These locations look beautiful. Lots of beautiful animations. I haven’t seen such a cool game since
Miscrits
closed.
In fact, the Facebook game was so impactful that some Miscrits players remember where they were when they heard the news the game was shutting down.
Miscrits shut down as the era of Facebook games waned–even Farmville eventually shut down. The original studio, Broken Bulb, was slowly starting to spend more to keep the game alive than it was making in revenue. Broken Bulb contends that Miscrits was one of the most successful games on Facebook, but even it couldn’t beat the market’s loss of interest in Facebook games. At the time, though, Broken Bulb’s research suggested Miscrits wouldn’t be a viable mobile title, so in 2017, the game vanished.
Flash forward to today, and players are getting to revisit their childhood love of Miscrits.
Reviving Miscrits
Over the past few years, GK has worked on an offline version of Miscrits as well as the larger revival project. Not only does this project aim to recreate the original experience, with Broken Bulb’s blessing no less, but to expand the experience for modern audiences. It’s an opportunity, said one player, to realize their love of Miscrits wasn’t just as a kids game but something genuine they truly loved. It also means a chance to take a crack at finishing their unfinished playthrough of the original.
The promise of the revival is thrilling for players who may have stopped thinking about the game, but for whom their favorite Miscrit has never left their heart.
The revival has a playable state that is a more challenging version of the original game. It features daily tasks that reward in-game currency to obtain special Miscrits that can’t be found in the wild, but every implemented Miscrit is available free through regular gameplay. And though all the original Miscrits aren’t in the playable version yet, many are. The hardest fight available in the game at the moment is the Earth Elementum, and the stat-boosting Relic sets from the Facebook era are in this version of the game as well.
Our team has one most important plan–to make the game much better by making many important and necessary changes. The biggest difficulty is probably the time that will need to be invested to revive this project.
The ongoing alpha version is testing the integration of resources from the original version of the game and preparing Miscrits for app store launches that markets may not have been ready for in 2017. Now, seven years later, with a dedicated fanbase and a working prototype up and running, GK and the team behind the revival are preparing to take a big swing and give Miscrits another go.
The alpha version will also integrate things that aren’t in the currently playable build. That’s tied in part to Miscrits’ history. Miscrits was actually two games: Sunfall Kingdom and Volcano Island. Sunfall Kingdom was the easiest to recover as it was the more popular of the two titles and provided players with iconic starter Flue. Unfortunately for Volcano Island, despite being as quality of an experience as its more famous half, it also required players to start from square one. But once GK finally partnered with Broken Bulb, it was possible to get assets from Volcano Island that were hard to restore.
The current alpha build of Miscrits is piecing the puzzle back together so that it relaunches to app stores with all the Miscrits content players remember from their childhoods. While it’s far too soon to speculate about the release of the Miscrits revival, the project seems set to go full steam ahead.