More than a year after Sony cancelled Concord—took its servers offline, issued refunds and shuttered developer Firewalk Studios—the shooter has been made playable again by a group recreating the game’s network infrastructure. The team’s members published video evidence on Friday showing a match running on unofficial Concord servers.
Footage of the resurrected Concord appeared on the game’s subreddit, where the effort was attributed to three contributors — Red, Real (also known as open_wizard) and Gwog — who are reverse-engineering the title and hosting custom backend services. Their work allows the beta build of Concord, which was already near-complete, to be played on PC.
The project remains a work in progress, but the developers describe it as functional. In a conversation with Polygon via Discord, the team said progress has been hampered by the anti-tamper and anti-cheat systems originally deployed by Firewalk Studios.
Red, who previously assisted in revivals of shuttered multiplayer games such as LawBreakers and Hyenas through bespoke tooling, outlined two primary obstacles. One was contending with deliberate protections in the game code that make reverse engineering difficult. “I started looking into it pretty much immediately after the game died,” Red said. The other challenge was reconstructing server-side logic that simply isn’t included in the client. “This is pretty much trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Red explained. “It’s incredibly tricky trying to find something that just… doesn’t exist.”
Real characterised the reverse-engineering process as “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,” Real added. “Then I found it enjoyable to tinker with what I had. This is my first time working with networking and multiplayer, and my first time collaborating in a team like this, so it’s been trial by fire.”
Neither Red nor Real claimed to be longtime fans of Concord. “I didn’t play Concord before [it shut down],” Red said. “I 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 particularly taken with the game when it was showcased at the 2024 State of Play,” Real admitted. “For me, the appeal was reviving a piece of lost media that seemed neglected. Digging through the game’s files revealed the effort the original developers put in — even in aspects I personally don’t like, it’s hard not to respect the work.”
Red emphasised a commitment to game preservation, but also curiosity: “Concord looked really fun and I wanted to try it out.”
Looking ahead, Red said the remaining tasks are mostly infrastructure-related and suggested a rudimentary service could be ready within a few weeks. They expect activity to peak early and then settle into a smaller community-driven scene. Although the current restoration targets PC, Red noted that a PlayStation 5 release would be feasible “in theory” if PS5 consoles could be jailbroken.
Players who miss Concord or who never had the chance to try it while it was active can join the project’s community on Discord to follow development and participate.
Source: Polygon
