'When the world ends, people just dance': As another MMO comes to an end, players come together for a final farewell rave

Bandai Namco announced the end of the anime MMO Blue Protocol in August 2024, setting the date for its demise as January 18, 2025. Fans made their displeasure known, but when the sad day finally arrived they met it with grace and style, dancing and partying into their final oblivion.

As reported by Automaton Media, the last hours of Blue Protocol saw players gather in the game's starting town of Asterliese for an impromptu farewell dance. The numbers were initially small, but it didn't take long for others to join.

Videos of the virtual rave were shared on X by michsuzu, who wrote, "When the world ends, people just dance":

Titania Gaming on YouTube caught the final 10 minutes of the festivities, and a much larger crowd, from a different angle:

As we wrote in 2017 when the Asheron's Call community came together to mourn its final moments, saying goodbye is never easy. Blue Protocol wasn't an especially long-lived MMO—it launched in Japan in 2023, and a planned global release never happened—but even in that relatively short period of time, a lot can happen: communities are built, and friends and memorioes are made. It's tough to have that taken away, but if you gotta go, this is the right way to do it.

Shygalgaming got some nice views too:

Dancing into darkness might even be seen as something of a Blue Protocol tradition. The same thing happened in 2020, during the final moments of a Blue Protocol closed beta.

It sucks to lose your game of choice, especially when so many friends (and enemies) are part of it, but the potential good news for committed fans is that Blue Protocol is being resurrected, to some extent, as Star Resonance, being developed by Chinese studio Bokura, reportedly with funding from Tencent. Some Blue Protocol players are a little dubious about it, though: Star Resonance is set in the same game world but will feature "reworked gameplay and storyline," and will be released for mobile devices as well as PC.