More than a year after Sony scrapped Concord, taking the first-person shooter offline, refunding customers, and shutting down developer Firewalk Studios, the game is once again playable, according to a team aiming to run the game on custom servers. The developers behind that effort posted video proof of their work on Friday, uploading a video to YouTube of a match being played on unofficial Concord servers.
Video of the newly playable Concord was shared on the game’s subreddit on Friday, crediting the project to three developers — Red, Real (aka open_wizard) and Gwog — who are working to reverse-engineer the shooter and get it up and running again. Their custom servers enable the beta version of Concord, which was fairly feature-complete, to be playable on PC.
Developers say the project is still a work in progress, but functional. Speaking with Polygon via Discord, the team working on Concord‘s custom servers say that it has been a challenge, thanks to anti-tamper and anti-cheat software employed by Firewalk Studios.
Red, who has previously worked on reviving shuttered multiplayer games like LawBreakers and Hyenas through custom software, identified two major challenges with Concord. One was contending with game code designed to discourage the kind of reverse engineering they do. “I started looking into it pretty much immediately after the game died,” Red said. The other was figuring out what server code isn’t present in the game client itself, and reconstructing that. “This is pretty much trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Red said. “It’s incredibly tricky trying to find something that just… doesn’t exist.”
Real described the reverse engineering work as “a job of test, adjust, repeat, poking and prodding until something works, or stops working.”
“At first I wanted to work on this project just to see how far I could get, but then I found it fun to sit and tinker with what I had,” Real added. “This is my first time working with networking/multiplayer, as well as working in a team like this, so it’s definitely been trial by fire.”
Interestingly, neither Red nor Real said they were necessarily fans of Concord itself. “I didn’t play Concord before [it shut down],” Red explained, “just saw when it died, and it looked like a really fun game, so I wanted to look into it.
“I first played Concord today, actually. And it really is a fun game.”
“I wasn’t really interested in the game when it was showcased at the 2024 State of Play,” Real said. “For me, it was more about getting a piece of lost media that seemingly no one cared about running again, but working on this project had me looking deep into the game’s files. You can really see the effort the developers put in, even if the game didn’t resonate with players, even in the things I personally don’t like about the game. Seeing the amount of work put in first-hand, it’s hard not to respect it.”
Red said they “care a lot about preserving games,” but also that Concord looked really fun and “I wanted to try it out.”
As for what’s next, Red said that the remaining work is “largely just setting up infrastructure, so I think we can have something going in a couple of weeks.” They believe the Concord custom servers will wind up being “more of a small community thing,” after day-one interest cools. And while the project is currently only for PC, Red offers some hope for those on PlayStation 5: “This should in theory be easy to set up if PS5s could be jailbroken,” they said.
For Concord fans who miss the game, or those who simply missed the game during its short lifespan, they can join that community via Discord.
