With its varied mechs, persistent online world, and pioneering use of voice communication, 2006's Chromehounds is the very definition of a hidden gem.
It never achieved the same level of fame as its online rivals, and its servers were turned off in 2010, but the FromSofrware-developed, Sega-published Xbox 360 exclusive still has legions of fans—and they're now able to play it online again, thanks to the efforts of a modder called ImagineBeingAtComputers, who created the OpenCOMBAS project back in 2023.
As recounted by Read Only Memo, the game's servers were recently re-established thanks to ImagineBeingAtComputers' incredible dedication and Adrian Cassar's Xenia Canary Netplay, an online fork of the popular Xbox 360 emulator.
The project is still in its early stages, with 6v6 'free' battles available but not voice communication. However, ImagineBeingAtComputers says the aim is to get Chromehounds' persistent campaign system back online:
"Right now the roadmap is to get the Neroimus War server running again in some capacity. That manages statistics, faction population, war status, things like that. A major component of this is going to be presenting enough data about the state of the war to convince the clients that they can login and play a match. We have to get it to the point where it accepts the war is up, and then actually be able to take the data that the clients are passing it and populate a big database. Which will be stuff like 'this ID is in this faction, in this squad, and has these statistics.' And then additionally store data as war sorties, so it'll be able to say 'this faction won this sortie at this location and it's now owned by this faction.' It'll be a complicated relational database we need to rebuild."
ImagineBeingAtComputers was recently made redundant, which isn't something to celebrate but does mean they have the ability to focus more time on this project:
"Friday night we had a 12-person lobby going and it really did just feel like suddenly we were all back in 2009, playing a game that hasn't been seen, in this capacity, for 15 years. It's really been a bit of a dream come true. I got laid off, too — literally on Tuesday. Part of me was like 'hey, at least I didn't have to put in my resignation so that I could play Chromehounds 24/7 from this point on.' Right now I'm just happy to be able to dedicated almost 100% to getting things off the ground here."