The Day Plastic Music Died: Epic Shut Down Rock Band and Other Servers

Enlarge / A few people absolutely got into Rock Band 2 at that game's 2008 launch party at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. Getty Images

If you've ever wanted a five-star expert rating for Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flames," now is the time to grab it. this track for Rock Band 3. Online stores, DLC and services for this game and 14 others will close on January 24 as Epic Games consolidates its online offerings.

Most notable among the games that Epic says have "outdated online services and servers" are five Rock Band< titles /em>: 1-3, The Beatles and Green Day. Rock Band's servers have been online since 2007, sending over 100 million playable versions of over 2,000 songs for people to play on various plastic instruments studded with brightly colored knobs. You will still be able to listen to all the songs you have downloaded for these titles, but you will no longer be able to log in for new songs. Those committed to Rock Band 4 can still continue to play online multiplayer, Epic notes.

Another cornerstone of a bygone era, Unreal will lose servers for several of its games. Epic notes that it intends to bring features back online for Unreal Tournament 3, but Gold, II, Tournament 2003 and 2004, and Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition will end after the date of January 24.

Epic, which aims to move all of its games into its modern, unified Epic Online Services, had a bit more bad news to share for fans of older or more original games. Mac and Linux versions of the sensitive pigeon visual romance novel Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star have disappeared from Epic's store, though owners can still play them. And the online games DropMix, Unreal Tournament (Alpha), Rock Band Blitz, SingSpace, and the L Rock Band Companion app will no longer work after January 24th. Battle Breakers, a mobile RPG that had already weathered Epic's long-term war with Apple, will stop working on December 30, although Epic is offering refunds for any in-game purchases made within 180 days from today's announcement.

If a game has an online component and you can't create your own servers, those servers will disappear at some point. Earlier this year, Ubisoft announced shutdowns for older games Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Splinter Cell, among others, eliminating the mode multiplayer and requiring owners to activate DLC before their deadline. The developers of Anno 2070 managed to rebuild a copy of their game that worked with new servers, keeping the game alive in many ways.

Nintendo, more aggressively, has previously removed the online aspects of entire generations of games by killing the servers of the Wii and DS, then the Wii U and 3DS. Hackers have also managed to circumvent some of these shutdowns.

The classic Rock Band trio's online shutdown may hamper your ability to break out the instruments and try out new tunes, but the games have served their fans far longer than most. Its direct competitor, Guitar Hero, shut down Guitar Hero Live services in 2018, making 92% of its streaming-only songs inaccessible. This decision stimulated a