Today marks a year since Sony pulled the plug on
PlayStation Home, a bizarre social experiment/virtual world that all PlayStation
3 owners were invited to explore.
Well, technically it was shut down on March
31, 2015. But in some time zones, like mine, it bled into the early morning of
April 1.
I guess March 31 is a popular date to kill antiquated
PlayStation games: Square Enix finally shut down the PS2 version of Final
Fantasy XI yesterday, March 31, 2016.
Anyway, Home was deemed pointless by most players during
its seven years of operation, yet it was inexplicably enjoyed by millions,
maybe even tens, of players.
I’ve written about Home extensively in the past, chronicling
the heyday and the final days, hours, and moments of the doomed MMO, so I’m
not going to beat a dead horse. But I will say that the sadness over Home’s
closure eventually gave way to acceptance, and then finally, a pleasant kind of nostalgia.
Dreading something is almost worse than it happening. And when it
finally does happen, the healing process can begin. That’s one last lesson PlayStation
Home had left to give me, I suppose.
I’m reminded of a line from the 1968 Disney flick, Herbie
the Love Bug: “A wise man once said, ‘When you come to [the] last page, close
the book.’”
It’s time to close the book again on the weird, wonderful
world of PlayStation Home. But in the name of nostalgia, here’s one last
picture. Taken in the summer of 2010, it’s how I choose to remember Home. That’s
part of the healing process too, I suppose: remembering the past not as it was
all the time, but how it was during the good times.
 |
| And sometimes, you just gotta move on. |
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