Blaseball season is over for good

theverge.com:

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

Born during covid, Blaseball was a bizarre text-only fantasy baseball simulator that imagined, essentially, baseball as played in a world of otherworldly horrors.

I regret that I never got to play Blaseball, and now it looks like I won’t get to because developer The Game Band is shutting it down. The company is laying off its Blaseball development team and will provide them with severance pay, healthcare extensions, and a dedicated staff member for job search help.

It was a remarkable example of procedural storytelling. Blaseball players could bet on the games to win points throughout a given week, where chance encounters, Dungeons & Dragons-style could rend games, and reality itself, asunder. At the end of the week, Blaseball’s community could spend their points to vote on new rules for the game, and in true D&D fashion, anything could happen. Or at least that’s what I gather from this delightful recap of what became known as The Discipline Era:

As a quick summary of some of the highlights, The Discipline Era saw a hellmouth open that devoured the Moab desert, three eldritch gods in the form of a giant peanut, a huge floating microphone that may have been a player’s ghost or something, and, naturally, a massive squid that seemed to mostly hang out, but once tried to eat someone. A powerful grand slam blasted the spacetime continuum apart, splitting Los Angeles into infinite parallel versions of itself, prompting its name to be changed from The Los Angeles Tacos to The Infinite Tacos.

After pissing off The Great Shelled One by not respecting its idols, it entombed the