Thanks for sharing! That’s not one I was aware of!
For similar things, look into the URU Diaspora (mentioned in that article), where after the shutdown of URU, the players scattered to other games, at one point recreating most of the game in Second Life before the original developers were able to set up a player-funded server that has been running for over a decade now. There is a book/thesis on it called Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
Another virtual diaspora was with the City of Heroes/Villains community, but they mostly just… scattered. I wasn’t involved in that one, so I don’t know if they gathered in other worlds.
The other one I’ve been a part of was Glitch: The Game, which made most of the game assets open source after shutdown. They didn’t let the server code out, since that was the foundation of Slack, so the community would have to start from scratch for the server software to remake it. To make things worse, Glitch was a Flash game, so, uh… the client also wasn’t viable - this is a lot of why the game shut down. A decade later, probably half a dozen groups trying to recreate Glitch have come and gone. As far as I know, the remaining people interested in restarting that one have, within the last year or two, coalesced into an actual company that has been more successful than any previous attempt (I think they are getting paid for it).
Digital Diaspora are very interesting to see. There is a wide variety of responses to the situation, and we’ve actually already seen quite a few of them here. It will be interesting to see what happens as the lights continue to dim. I have some hopes, but that’s very 