The 20th anniversary week wrapped up on March 5th. Here's what happened.
Eleven events ran across nine days, organized across multiple mod communities without any central coordinator beyond the community Discord and individual mod teams. The coordination was real work, and it shows.
February 24 and 27 — Freelancer New Universe showcase events. The New Universe project hosted showcase sessions demonstrating the mod's current state and organized server play.
February 25 — Librelancer showcase stream. Developer callum streamed a live demonstration of Librelancer's current capabilities — the engine rendering Freelancer's systems, the improved UI, the state of multiplayer implementation. Worth watching if you missed it; the preserved video gives you a real sense of how far the project has come.
February 26 and 28 — Sirius Revival play-together events. Sirius Revival is a community project working to rebuild aspects of the Freelancer multiplayer experience. Two organized sessions ran across these dates.
March 1 — Freelancer Nightstalker's Universe event. Nightstalker's Universe is one of the smaller multiplayer communities that has kept servers running for years. They hosted their own anniversary session.
March 4 — Vanilla play-together. The anniversary date itself: a vanilla co-op session organized by community members XxSARGExX979 and DragonFire, using the vanilla co-op mod. Playing the original game, unmodified, with other people. As the right way to spend the day.
March 5 — HD Edition play-together and AMA. The HD Edition team hosted a play session on the current build of HD Edition, followed by a community Q&A about the mod's development and future plans.
That's eleven events across nine days for a twenty-year-old game with no official support. No developer, no publisher, no marketing. Just the community deciding the game deserved a proper celebration and organizing it themselves.
There's no good metric for what that means in attendance numbers — we won't publish figures we can't verify. What we can say is that every event had participants, every stream had viewers, and the community Discord was more active than usual for the duration.
Twenty years. Still flying.