The emblem for Atom Universe featured over one of many recreation’s social hubs. (Photograph from Atom Universe)
In the event you frequently play video games, you’ve in all probability been right here: you’re bored together with your present rotation, you go to your platform’s retailer and after realizing you in all probability don’t need to purchase one other recreation, you begin skimming by means of the choice of free-to-play titles.
Perhaps this isn’t as frequent as I believe, however it’s been an everyday incidence for my buddies and me for years, and it’s led to the invention of loads of horrible so-called video games.
Big City Stories, Warface, Don’t Even Think, Caravan Stories, Fantasy Strike, Operation7: Showdown, Bless Unleashed, the checklist goes on, and I may say quite a bit about a few of them.
However there are a couple of video games I left off that checklist for a purpose; they’ve turn out to be related to me once more simply this previous week.
Story continues under commercial
Like I discussed earlier, a pal of mine and I not too long ago discovered ourselves in that very same boredom-fueled search, which as soon as once more led us to the free-to-play part of the PlayStation Store.
After realizing many of the video games have been the identical ones we’d already seen, I gave up and went again to enjoying one thing by myself. However my pal wasn’t prepared to surrender simply but and as an alternative began digging by means of his recreation catalog to seek out one thing we may play collectively.
My pal hardly ever has PlayStation Plus except he seems like he actually wants it, which restricted our choices to free-to-play video games. After skipping over many of the titles he’d already performed, he rediscovered a recreation we hadn’t touched in years: Atom Universe.
In the event you’ve by no means heard of it — which I wouldn’t be shocked by — Atom Universe is a web based social hub launched in 2016, as a religious successor to Sony’s PlayStation Home, which shut down only a yr earlier in 2015.
For no matter purpose, the sport was additionally seemingly renamed to Home Legacy in some unspecified time in the future on Steam however has remained as Atom Universe on PlayStation and on all of its in-game branding.
Lengthy story quick, Atom Universe wasn’t excellent, some would possibly even name it downright horrible, and it did not catch on anyplace close to as a lot as PlayStation House did.
My pal and I most probably found Atom Universe someday round 2019, though I could possibly be utterly incorrect. After we first tried it, we unsurprisingly discovered that the sport was virtually useless. Nonetheless, it was clear there have been a couple of individuals hanging on, together with others who had doubtless found the sport the identical method we did.
Due to how tough the sport felt, we dropped it nearly instantly, leaving it to collect mud in our libraries for what we assumed could be perpetually. However, as I discussed earlier, that didn’t find yourself being the case.
After we rediscovered it, my pal nearly immediately determined to redownload it and take a look at it once more. My reminiscence of the sport’s high quality stopped me from doing the identical.
When he lastly bought again into it, he instructed me one thing stunning; it was nonetheless up and operating in 2026 and nonetheless had a couple of lively gamers. After a bit extra exploring, he even discovered that the sport nonetheless has a Discord server.
So what did I do with that info? I joined it, after all, and began wanting round.
To my shock, the Discord was pretty lively, with individuals posting each couple of days and even organizing what appeared like month-to-month in-game occasions.
Out of curiosity, I began checking some not too long ago lively customers’ linked PlayStation profiles and was shocked to see that at the very least ten of those individuals had tons of, typically 1000’s, of hours performed in Atom Universe. One person even had over 5 thousand hours logged.
It was actually stunning to see {that a} recreation many individuals thought-about “useless” again in 2019, and even years earlier, nonetheless has a really small however extraordinarily devoted participant base. That type of factor isn’t remarkable however seeing it occur with a recreation constructed fully round social interplay makes it particularly attention-grabbing.
Much more curiously, upon additional inspection, many of those high-playtime customers had a couple of different video games in frequent, primarily Nebula Realms and The Four Kings Casino and Slots.
I haven’t been capable of finding a lot info on Nebula Realms, however it seems to have been similar to Atom Universe, serving as one other religious successor to PlayStation House. It additionally appears to have been shut down in some unspecified time in the future and faraway from the PlayStation Retailer.
4 Kings On line casino and Slots continues to be obtainable and considerably lively. My pal and I attempted it out, however it was about as underwhelming as anticipated, basically the identical idea as Atom Universe and Nebula Realms, simply centered round digital playing.
Within the days since, I’ve tried to interact with the small lively group on the Atom Universe Discord, however any point out of the sport’s participant depend, participant base or its standing as a “useless” recreation tends to be deleted inside hours by the moderators, making dialogue considerably tough.
In the long run, it’s attention-grabbing, and truthfully a bit endearing, to see “useless” video games preserve small however lively communities. But it surely’s nonetheless stunning {that a} recreation like Atom Universe, with its give attention to social interplay and usually poor repute, is certainly one of them, and that the individuals who keep it up are so devoted.
Whitford might be reached at [email protected].