On March 4th, 2023, Freelancer turns twenty years old.
The community has organized. A full week of events — February 24th through March 5th — has been announced across multiple mod communities and servers. Eleven events are planned, spanning Discovery Freelancer, Crossfire, Freelancer HD Edition, Librelancer, Sirius Revival, New Universe, and a vanilla co-op session. This is a coordinated effort from people who have been keeping this game alive for two decades without any support from its publisher.
What's planned: organized play-together sessions on various servers, a Librelancer showcase stream, community events and organized PvP and co-op gameplay, an HD Edition AMA, and a Vanilla co-op event using the co-op mod. Some events are competitive, some are casual. The community Discord is the hub for joining — individual mod Discords have their own channels for the specific events.
Twenty years is a long time. Freelancer came out when a 17-year-old playing it today wasn't born yet. It's had no developer support since the mid-2000s. The master server is offline. There is no digital re-release. And the community is throwing itself a birthday party that spans multiple servers and a full week of programming.
That's not nothing. That's remarkable.
The honest part: Microsoft hasn't said anything about the anniversary. There's no reason to expect they will. That's fine. The community doesn't need them to.
We'll be covering the events as they happen starting in late February. If you want to join any of the play-togethers, the community Discord at The Starport and the individual mod Discord servers are where to start.
See you in Sirius.