Long Live The New Lords Of Utopia

Long Live The New Lords Of Utopia

Dear Utopians,

We have a very big announcement today. We have finalized a deal with Muga Gaming LLC to acquire Utopia. This is effective immediately, and Utopia is now running on their servers. Dave and Jeff, the founders of Muga Gaming, are long-time players of Utopia, and are committed to modernising and growing the game. Under their ownership, we know Utopia will have a great future.

We took over stewardship of Utopia from OMAC/Jolt in early 2009. After they acquired both Earth:2025 and Utopia from their original creator, Mehul Patel, OMAC found both pieces of software difficult to operate, and shut down Earth:2025. Although it was too late for Earth, we were drawn to the deep complexity and unique social fabric of Utopia. We did a deal to take control of Utopia and relaunch it with new code that would serve as a foundation for future development. Rewriting everything from scratch, while attempting to perfectly emulate the original game logic, took much longer than expected. In September 2009, a prolonged denial-of-service attack forced OMAC to shut down the old game server, and it was into that fire that our new codebase was born.

In the seven years that followed, we spent countless weeks and weekends working to fix issues, tackle cheating, speed up the server and build new features. The opportunity to run Utopia has been a rewarding challenge, which we were privileged to share with many staff members and volunteers along the way. A huge thanks to Bishop, Neil, Róisín, Thundergore, Simon, Vlad, Rob, Eman, Palem, all the tools developers, wiki contributors, forum community members and everyone who spends their own time and money developing content, running IRC servers and generally making Utopia a better community for everyone.

During the last four years, we did what we could to keep Utopia fresh, despite having full time jobs in a completely different company. All the while, we knew the game deserved more. Many people have expressed interest in taking over Utopia over the years, but only Dave and Jeff have shown the passion and acumen required to be successful. Having had the opportunity over the last 10 months to get to know them, we are confident that they are the Lords of Utopia that the World’s longest running MMORPG deserves. We wish Lord Dave, Lord Jeff and all Utopians a very bright future!

Deepest regards,
Sean and Brian


A few words from Muga Gaming:

Today marks the beginning of a new era as we complete a transaction to purchase Utopia. The process of moving all the various pieces under our control may cause some downtime over the next couple weeks as we transition to our servers. As players, we understand the effects of this and will use our best efforts to ensure downtimes are limited and as much notice as possible can be provided.

We want to thank Sean and Brian for taking the time to listen to our offer to purchase request and understand our seriousness and sincerity from the start. The closing of this transaction concludes a nearly 10 month process that began with a simple e-mail. Sean and Brian have devoted quite a lot more to the game than can readily be seen as a player in the community and we offer our sincerest thanks for their passion to see Utopia as a staple that must not be entrusted carelessly. They provide us with a great opportunity to usher in new life to the game that we all love. Without their passion and vision none of this would be possible. Thank you Sean. Thank you Brian.

We are very excited by this acquisition. The two of us have been involved in this game for many years and we are thrilled with this opportunity to bring a lot of what we feel the community has been asking for to the game. Some of our early plans include: official support for mobile apps, the return of a test / genesis server, recruitment efforts to bring in new players, and adding some basic tour and explanatory features to the game.

We look forward to working closely with all of you, the community, which makes this game great. We hope that you are as excited as we are and will support us through this transition as we work diligently to make Utopia great again!

We are also excited to announce that we will join Benjamin on his next #Triggered podcast. We welcome everyone to share your questions or discussion topics with Benjamin and we will get to as many as we can.

Dave & Jeff