Concord, one of the most infamous videogame flops of all time, creeps back to life thanks to fans who have spent months building custom server software

Concord is one of the most famous flameouts in videogame history: Years of development, hundreds of millions spent, and about two weeks of uptime before Sony decided it'd seen enough and took it all out behind the wood shed—the game, the studio, the dream—and put it to rest. But somehow, Concord returned.

Not official Concord, no, but a fan-fired effort to make the game playable again: As first reported by The Game Post, a small group has been working on the project for months, and full matches are now playable on customer servers.

"The project is still WIP," developer Red said on the Concord Delta Discord. "It's playable, but buggy."

The team shared a video of one of the test matches today on YouTube. It's not the most pro-tier shooter action I've ever seen, but yeah, that's definitely Concord.

With the Concord revival now drawing a new level of attention, Red posted a follow-up asking everyone to be respectful, "whether you like the game or not," an unfortunate acknowledgement of the ugliness that surrounded Concord's development and demise.

They also made it clear that piracy will not be tolerated, and that the developers will not provide the Concord game files for anyone who doesn't already have them.

"I know this sucks for people who got forcefully refunded, but lawyers are most likely already watching everything we do and I want to ensure this project stays as legal as we realistically can do," Red wrote. "We will be removing any posts containing links to copyrighted files."

Here's another internal gameplay test video, from developer open_wizard:

I'm really eager to see how this goes. Obviously there's no money to be made on it, and I think the most likely outcome is a cease-and-desist letter from Sony's legal department. But with Concord now officially a "failure," it presumably won't have to worry about perpetually aggrieved gamers howling about how it's "woke," and that means—if it can dodge the lawyers—it's free to be judged on its own merits. That's what interests me, because who knows? Concord might turn out to be not so bad after all.