Canceled Game Concord Is Being Revived by Developers

The online shooter Concord, developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, experienced an exceptionally brief lifespan before being withdrawn from sale. Despite attracting a small yet dedicated player community, the title failed to achieve commercial success, leading to its removal from digital storefronts and the eventual closure of the development studio. Now, a team of reverse-engineering enthusiasts is working to resurrect the defunct game, breathing new life into a project many had considered permanently lost.

Following its underwhelming launch, publisher Sony delisted Concord and issued refunds to purchasers. The game’s sales reportedly fell below 25,000 units, and player counts remained low, prompting Sony to shut down Firewalk Studios and lay off roughly two hundred employees. Ryan Ellis, the game director at Firewalk, acknowledged in a public statement that while certain elements of Concord resonated with players, other aspects, including its initial rollout, did not meet the studio’s expectations.

Although Concord was not widely regarded as a poorly made game, it struggled to capture a large enough audience. Currently, three hobbyist programmers operating under the online aliases real, Red, and gwog are reverse-engineering the title to make it playable again. In a recent interview, gwog described the process as “the virtual equivalent of taking things apart and putting them together.”

The team recently succeeded in getting a build of Concord operational and shared footage of a test match on YouTube. Red, who previously led a similar revival effort for the game LawBreakers, explained that this was his first time actually playing Concord. He admitted he often seeks out defunct games, partly due to the technical hurdles they present. “Concord is probably the most complex project I’ve worked on so far,” he noted, “and that really motivated me to keep going.”

Reverse-engineering a commercial game like this typically involves one of two methods. Red opted for an approach that effectively turns the game client into its own server. He pointed out that game clients and servers frequently share portions of code. “Sometimes there’s enough of the server left in the game that we can ‘activate’ that code and make the game believe it’s a server,” Red explained. “But we almost always need to fill in the gaps. That involves a ‘trying to find a needle in a haystack’ approach, trying to find something that doesn’t exist and recreating it. This is typically the most challenging part of these projects.”

Concord was protected by anti-tamper software designed to prevent cheating, which also posed a major obstacle for the revival team. Red described the protection as “nearly impossible” to crack conventionally. Instead, the group discovered an exploit that allowed them to “forcefully decrypt the game’s code,” which then enabled them to restore the game and begin server development. Although Red started this process shortly after Concord was taken offline, the team spent a considerable amount of time stalled by the anti-tamper measures, with most of the progress occurring over the last two months.

Real, who had no prior reverse-engineering experience, recreated the backend API for the project. He likened the work to “building something without the instructions.” He elaborated, “Sometimes you have a picture of what it’s supposed to be. Sometimes you only have the pieces. You slowly, or if you get lucky, quickly, build it up until it looks exactly like, or close enough to, the metaphorical picture.” Real focused on backend server components such as player save data, which tracks unlocked items, player level, and experience points.

A video from a recent playtest was shared on the Concord subreddit, sparking renewed interest in the project. The associated Discord server, where users can learn about upcoming private tests, has grown rapidly, attracting hundreds of members hoping to play Concord again. While public access is not yet available, interested players can register for future testing opportunities. Notably, several former Firewalk Studios developers have also joined the server, expressing enthusiasm about the prospect of seeing their game revived.

Red, an advocate for game preservation and the Stop Killing Games movement, plans to eventually host Concord on a platform he created named Ancify. This service is designed to offer shared infrastructure, including authentication, matchmaking, and server deployment, for multiple discontinued games, reducing redundant effort across different revival projects. Other titles already on the platform in varying states of functionality include Radical Heights, Hyenas, and LawBreakers. Although no specific release date has been set, Red anticipates adding Concord to Ancify “soon.”

Reflecting on what drives these preservation efforts, Real highlighted curiosity and motivation as key factors. “I’m very interested in ‘lost media’ and the like,” he said, “so I initially gravitated toward Concord because of the very large wave it made online as well as its incredibly short lifespan. Over the course of the project I began to respect a lot of the design choices I initially questioned, and I think that also motivated me to keep working on it. Part of it is wanting other people to see what I saw.”

For those questioning why the team chose to revive Concord, Red offered a thoughtful response. “I just hope people can be respectful about this. Regardless of whether someone likes the game or not, there’ll always be people liking a specific game, and you never know, the game you like might be the one dying next.”

(Source: Aftermath)