I've spent
a ton of time getting Yserbius and Twinion running on a modern platform. For all my effort, MedievaLands has just hit 24k played hours after 18 months of uptime. Just 1000 days of player time ... not a lot! And during that period, the game has cost me over $500 in certificates, hosting, etc. just to keep the lights on (mostly certificate costs, actually; hosting is only $60 a year).
I never played Empiriana, so I'm unfamiliar with what made it different, and/or a better game than its precursors. I assume that getting Empiriana running again would be a work of a few hundred hours for a reboot with the original code, or a few thousand hours for a remake like I did with Yserbius on MedievaLands. Not to mention a few hours of upkeep every week interacting with players to make sure that they know I'm listening to their concerns and bug reports (the players are the best part of the game for me!).
With all this in mind, I totally understand the original developers' lack of interest in bringing this game back. It's an expensive hobby, and for old games like this, it's a lot work, a lot of cost, a requirement that you commit ongoing hours to community management... and not a lot of demand.
I have no desire to give up working on ML. It's a labor of love and of nostalgia. But this project has also given me a lot of insight into the huge amount of effort required to get an old multiplayer game working again. I understand why someone else wouldn't want to go down this path!
