Rising Thunder Launching Open Source Community Version A Year After Shutting Down

It's been over a year since the free to play fighting game Rising Thunder shut down but the company behind the game is taking an incredible step to support fans of the game. They're launching an open source "Community" version called "Rising Thunder: Community Edition" in January, 2018. The developers posted the following on Reddit:

Hey folks. Super inspired by your efforts to bring back the game. We'd like to pitch in with a little help. 😉

So here's what we're doing, all coming this January. We're calling it "Rising Thunder: Community Edition." Our intent here is to give the game back to you guys, the community, and let you run with it.

Final game build: We've tinkered with the old final build of the game, adding offline, local play (!!!) along with some quality of life improvements. Local play will support keyboard vs. controller only, but it should be straightforward to hack in 1p controller support through external scripting. Just to be clear, this release is basically the same one you had in your hands when we turned off the servers in 2016. Please don't expect new characters, systems, etc.

Source code for an open-source version of the Rising Thunder server, so you can play matchmade games online. The original RT server is somewhat of a beast, segmented into a bunch of different services that aren't particularly easy to deploy or maintain. So instead we've whipped up a first pass at a bare-bones server that will allow you to play online with rudimentary matchmaking and limited features. And we're making it open source so that if you're inclined you can tinker and improve it.

All of this is free, and will stay that way forever. In the meantime, our team has moved on to develop something new and we'll share that with you when the time is right. Until then, Happy Holidays from the Rising Thunder team! -Reddit

Normally when a game like Rising Thunder shuts down it stays shut down forever and the code behind it rots away in a hard drive somewhere. It's interesting to see the game's developer publicly release their code years after the game originally shut down. It's especially interesting considering there's been ZERO activity on the official Rising Thunder Twitter account since they announced the game's closure back on March 25th, 2016.

Some background: Rising Thunder's closure was announced shortly after Riot Games inc acquired the studio behind the game, Radiant Entertainment. Perhaps most interesting though is the last pargraph posted on Reddit about the Rising Thunder team working on a new project that they'll reveal "when the time is right". Once revealed Riot Games will finally earn the "s" in its name and become a multi-game company.