Back in May of 2009 I posted about a press release for Playboy Manager, Playboy’s attempt at an MMO, which they christened a “Massively Casual Online Game.”
They might have actually been a bit ahead of their time on that one.
And, after that, despite my signing up for the mailing list, I never heard a single thing about the game.
I mentioned it a year later in my month in review post (so I guess I mentioned it twice) where I said:
And a year ago Playboy’s “Massively Casual Online Game” Playboy Manager was announced. The game was supposed to launch in the summer of 2009 according to the press release. The site for the game is still there (go Google it) but it still mentions signing up for beta invites. Casual might refer to the development plan I guess.
The game looked to be on the same trajectory that Planet Michael is now; all talk, no rock.
However, the game did eventually launch. Or so I hear.
In an astonishingly bad use of captured email addresses, Jolt Online Gaming and/or Playboy apparently failed to alert those who expressed an interest in the game that it had actually gone live. You would think after all that work, they might have put some effort into publicizing it.
Seriously, I would have logged in just to experience it, had I but known.
Their effort went live as a Facebook game, under the name Playboy Party, back in November 2010. Of course, since it went to Facebook, it was probably flagged as Beta like every other Facebook game, so maybe they felt it wasn’t time yet to go to the public.
However, time was of the essence, as the game closed on September 12th of this year.
In the middle of that, in March 2011, things go so messed up that the game had to be reset and everybody had to start again from scratch.
Brilliant!
And so the game has come and gone, having garnered all of 400 actual players during its short life span. It may now aspire to be a footnote in the appendix of an unpublished volume of esoteric video game history.
Thanks to UnSubject over at Vicarious Existence whose post on the subject, which has more detail and actual screen shots from the game, reminded me again that the Playboy Manager/Playboy Party even existed. Plus there is a bonus mention of another failed Playboy online game project, Poisonville!
The Ancient Gaming Noob 