What is a video game really? What is a MMO? Is it just simply a game? Maybe, but that would imply that the game ends when the servers shut off. But yet this game lives on even after death, tell me what does that mean?
It means that City of Heroes was more than a game - it was a dream.
Our dream.
And every one of us here was a part of that dream.
Every single hero that appeared at the bottom of those steps in Atlas Park...that was not just a digital costume, it was one person's dream of what it meant to be a superhero : what that hero looked like, what powers it had, what story had created those powers - every character was a little piece of someone's imagination made real.
A digital reality perhaps, but reality nonetheless. In terms of concept alone, just because something is made out of pixels doesn't mean it's any less real than that same concept drawn on paper or written in words, or cast as a sculpture in bronze.
Paragon City was a place where those dreams could come to life.
And you know the funny thing about dreams? The thing that makes them different, makes them unique?
A dream cannot die.
The force that gives life to a dream comes from within us. It is our curiosity, our wonder, our drive to create and explore...that is where dreams spring from. The human heart is what powers a dream, and as long as it beats, the dream lives.
When they closed the servers, NCsoft thought that was an end to it. But they didn't understand -
couldn't understand, because City of Heroes was never their dream. They thought they were killing a game.
But they were wrong.
What they were trying to do was kill a dream - and you cannot kill a dream.
