Wizard101, an MMO for kids that’s older than most of its playerbase, is coming to Steam. Well, kind of. Wizard101 has already been on Steam for US players since 2018, but as of yesterday the venerable and family-friendly massively-multiplayer online RPG (FFMMORPG) is also available on Steam in Europe, where it had previously been absent.
If you’re anything like me, that news has you asking yourself one question: Why the hell does Wizard101 sound so familiar? Here’s the answer: This is the game that found itself beset by bizarre messages from a hacker in September 2022, which said things like “BRADLEY COME DOWN TO MY OFFICE THIS INSTANT,” “dick and balls,” and—my personal favourite—”The next world is my boss’s asshole,” a statement of such weighty profundity it sounds more at home in a Egor Letov song than a shitpost on a kids’ game.
Those messages went viral back in 2022, and briefly turned Wizard101 from playground obscurity into the most interesting MMO on the market. Developer KingIsle eventually shut the servers down to root out its poet infiltrator and posted an apology to the game’s users on its forums.
Part of me wishes they’d let it roll on a while longer, but I suppose it would be troubling for your average 8-year-old to be confronted by an official message from your favourite game that says “come to room 102 and ill beat you up“. Even WoW doesn’t do that to you.
Anyway, if you’re of a European persuasion and either a literal child or someone who just wants to experience the raw thrill of a game that might erupt into John Cooper Clarke poetry at any given moment, you can find Wizard101 over on EU Steam right now, where it’s also been newly localised into French, Italian, German, Spanish, French, Greek, and Polish. And UK English, which is odd, since it doesn’t appear to be present on UK Steam. I might make a character right now; you never know what’s gonna pop up.
