20 years on, Bully is still very much a cult hit. It’s relatively understated by Rockstar Games’ standards; it’s a far more concise experience compared to its other sprawling open-world games, but it’s no less excellent. Recently, a team of modders brought GTA Online-style multiplayer functionality to Canis Canem Edit. But, sadly, it has already been pulled.
The brainchild of YouTuber ‘Swegta,’ the Bully Online mod was filled with promise. Loaded up with various minigames, including racing and a bona fide FPS mode, Rat Wars, alongside other social features, Bully Online was primed to become the de facto way to experience Bullworth with pals. After launching in mid-December, everything seemed all well and good. However, with the mod now being completely scrubbed, it looks like the team may have caught Rockstar’s eye – and ire.
A statement on the project’s Discord server reads: “The Bully Online project is shutting down forever, which unfortunately means all the following is going to happen in 24 hours: our official Bully Online server (on swegta.com) will be shutdown, development of scripts for Bully Online will stop, the source code will be removed from swegta.com, all our webpages referring to it will be removed, the launcher downloads will [be] taken down, and all Bully Online account data will be permanently deleted.”
Scorched. Earth. The reason for Bully Online’s demise has yet to be confirmed, but Swegta says he will “make a statement” on Wednesday, January 21, to address it. Though the mod required an official version of the game to run, and ostensibly didn’t interfere with any of Rockstar’s other products, the team had set up a ko.fi to support development. This also brought with it benefits, including priority queuing. Usually, monetizing a mod in any capacity is enough to get legal teams twitching, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was enough for Rockstar to pull the plug if this was the studio’s doing. The team member goes on to say that “this was not something we wanted,” so this certainly looks to be the case.
Although this is a sad end for what was shaping up to be an excellent mod, it serves as a reminder that Bully remains as beloved now as it was two decades ago. Rockstar CEO Dan Houser last year confirmed that Bully 2 was originally nixed due to “bandwidth issues.” Still, it won’t stop me from hoping that, once the GTA 6 release date has finally arrived, the studio will finally get around to revisiting Bullworth.
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