Since 2007, Dead End City has been an escape for tens of thousands of writers, from nearly every corner of the world, who came together and formed a community that lasted over a decade. The dark themes, artistic environment, and wide gamut of role-play experience made our virtual destination a cult classic in Second Life.

As most of you know, I’ve been doing this whole “creator of role-play” thing in Second Life for a very long time. My source of inspiration comes from two places: the people whom I collaborate with closely (staff) and the work that the community produces (eg. forum posts, journals, articles, tweets, avatars on sim). It’s also stories of people who discovered real-life friendships and relationships that remind me that what we have is truly amazing. That special formula between creator, staff, and community is what I believe truly makes a role-play community stand apart from others; I’m very proud to say we’ve been able to do it for over a decade.

At last though, all good things must come to an end.

There are a number of reasons why I’ve come to this decision, but simply the constant struggle between traffic flowing to our sister communities, overall decline of SL, and a lack of role-play leadership today, the place we call Dead End will have to live on in the friendships, stories, and photos we’ve been inspired to make all these years.

Thank you.

I want to thank our current staff for their years of dedicated support, including the ones that we’ve seen come and go over the years. To have the patience and dedication to come on daily to not only role-play, but moderate a global community on their own spare time and come up with big stories is astounding. There were struggles, there were failures, but I know that each one of them had their hearts in the right place. I am deeply grateful for them being shepherds to our community.

I also want to thank you, the role-players, for being an amazing and talented group of people. The energy, planning, and financial resources to sustain the community was no easy task; the hundreds of hours to build, script, texture, and manage DE over the years was something you all truly inspired me to do … and still do.

What’s next?

While Dead End City will fade into black, I am going to extend the ideas and themes that brought people together into a new extension of our sister-community, the Crack Den.

In the next few days, I’ll be sorting through existing tenants before the Dead End regions become unavailable. Immediately following that, I will be kicking off an all-new project.

Still keeping to the modern-day dark urban role-play, at least 2 new regions will be built as a neighboring town to Hathian (Crack Den), connected physically, with familiar rules (eg. adult-only zoned) and themes (eg. businesses) that pay homage to the original ideas that made Dead End City stand out from the rest of SL.

Want to get involved?

Please reach out to me directly.