Player revives Anthem on private servers after shutdown

The electronic game preservation community recorded a remarkable technical breakthrough this Wednesday, January 21, 2026. Just nine days after EA and BioWare permanently shut down the Anthem servers on January 12, user And799 demonstrated that it is possible to run the title on private servers. In a video published on January 17, the researcher showed two players operating simultaneously in the same environment, proving that the basic structure of the software can be dissociated from the official Electronic Arts infrastructure.

The technical feasibility of restoring access to the game is a positive point for the digital preservation movement. The project, running parallel to the community initiative Cenotaph, validates the statements of Mark Darrah, former producer at BioWare, about the existence of codes for local servers that could be recovered. This discovery offers a technical lifeline to a work that was officially condemned to obsolescence, allowing the engineering and artistic work invested in the project not to be completely discarded due to the publisher's negligence.

"The code for local servers really existed and could be saved and recovered. I would suggest a $10 million plan to restart the game as a single-player focused experience if EA decided to separate from the intellectual property."

However, the dependence on amateur efforts to correct corporate planning failures is subject to severe criticism. It is regrettable that EA and BioWare have shown total disinterest in providing an official solution, such as an offline mode or private hosting tools, forcing enthusiasts to reverse engineer to save the product. While the online profile and centralized systems remain inoperative, the industry observes the next victim of the "online-only" model: the MMORPG New World from Amazon, which has already been removed from stores and will be shut down on January 31, 2027.

"This is just a personal research experiment. What doesn't work is the entire online player profile layer and other things probably centralized on the servers now absent from EA."

And799's experiment proves that the death of games due to administrative decisions is often a financial choice rather than an insurmountable technical limitation. With the success of this private simulation, pressure on companies to release end-of-life patches for their software is likely to increase.