I’ll be honest, I never really understood all the ardour for The Crew, but that’s no criticism. There are plenty of games (hello, Mafia 3) that I love to the absolute bafflement of my friends and loved ones, and I’d be very sad if they got taken away. So even if I don’t know what people see in The Crew, I certainly understand the upset at Ubisoft killing the servers and making the game unplayable last year.
One response to that bit of videogame vandalism was, of course, the Stop Killing Games campaign, but other fans took a different tack. The good folks at The Crew Unlimited have been beavering away at a fanmade revival of the game for over a year and a half: a server emulator with both offline and online modes—”Your local server, your local savegames, your game. No one will ever be able to take this away from you now.”
It’s out today, and will let you play the defunct CaRPG like Yves Guillemot never Old Yeller’d it. There is, of course, one issue: you need to already have a copy of The Crew for it to work. With the game scrubbed from history like Nikolai Yezhov, that’s easier said than done, though the project itself says on its Discord that “The truth is that, as long as you manage to run the game files, we have absolutely no way to tell a legit copy from a non-legit one, so we just have to let you in.” So whether you own The Crew legitimately or you’re some kind of criminal, it sounds like it’ll work.
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Don’t be a criminal though. I think I’m legally obligated to say you should not be a criminal. Not even if the crime is cool.
(Image credit: Ubisoft)
Regardless, I suspect there aren’t many people out there who are A) desperate to play The Crew but B) don’t already have access to it. And if you do, running The Crew Unlimited is easy as pie. All you have to do is download the mod, run its launcher, point at your TheCrew.exe, then go hogwild living like it’s 2014 all over again. I hope publishers stop killing games some day, but for now, what is dead may never die.