Fans Have Rebuilt Stargate Worlds — the MMO That Never Launched Is Playable Again in Free Alpha
Stargate Worlds, the massively multiplayer online game announced in 2006 that reached closed beta in 2008 before developer Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment collapsed in 2010, is playable again — thanks to a fan preservation project called The Fifth Race. MMO news site Massively Overpowered reported on Wednesday (September 9) that the fan-run server is live in free alpha testing.
According to the team's announcement on the r/Stargate subreddit, quoted by Massively Overpowered, the project uses the original 2008 closed beta client. Because the original server code is gone, the group reverse-engineered the game's network protocol and rebuilt the entire backend from scratch in C, Python and PostgreSQL. The team describes the result as "a fan-made universe faithful to the Stargate saga, built little by little by fans for fans."
The developers caution that the server is still in alpha and only a handful of quests are available so far. The project is hosted at thefifthrace.online. As with any unofficial server, it is not affiliated with MGM or Amazon, and players should weigh the usual security caveats before installing a client from a fan project.
It's a notable revival for a game many fans had written off entirely. Stargate Worlds was the franchise's one serious attempt at an MMO, and its beta build has circulated among collectors for years without a working server to connect to — until now.