PlanetSide

Released on May 20, 2003 by Sony Online Entertainment for Windows, PlanetSide tried something almost nobody had attempted: a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter. Instead of a match that reset every few minutes, it dropped you into a persistent, never-ending war fought across massive seamless continents, with thousands of players contesting territory that stayed captured when you logged off. It launched as a subscription game, asking for a monthly fee like the era's big MMORPGs.

Three factions waged that war: the authoritarian Terran Republic, the freedom-fighting New Conglomerate, and the technologically radical Vanu Sovereignty. Battles could swell to hundreds of players pouring into a single base assault — tanks, aircraft, and infantry all in one sprawling fight — and the game (and later its sequel) set a Guinness World Record for the most players in an online FPS battle. That scale was the whole appeal and also the catch: it demanded serious hardware, a big population, and a tolerance for chaos that kept it a beloved cult game rather than a blockbuster.

PlanetSide went free-to-play in April 2014 before Sony finally shut down its servers on July 1, 2016, after thirteen years. Its ambition lived on in PlanetSide 2, a faster, modernized 2012 successor with the same three factions — but for anyone who fought through those first massive continental wars, the original was the one that proved an FPS could be a whole persistent world.