Wow, SO I loved FFR in High school 2002-2005.
I got my friends and eventually many throughout my school playing this game. I played it frequently during class, it was my way of coping with boring lectures about things I already knew from teachers I had disdain toward. Senior year I even ate lunch in the yearbook class computer lab and played through lunch.
A few years passed.
I was going for my Computer sci, psyc double major. Although I hardly played at the time, I was distraught around my freshman year of college in '06-'07 when I checked in to play ffr and found the website was taken down indefinitely.
Six to 8 months later when I checked again I guess in '07 or '08 came a letter of apology from a programmer at FFR's (R1) center, I believe it may have been Bemans, but I don't really know exactly who bc I was just a fan. This guy wrote that although he had worked laboriously over the game to keep it alive, he didn't own the rights to the game. His friend Synth owned the rights to the game and he was dreaming big and working on some huge deals with major companies, Synth had failed to pay a few friends/developers during this time, and that pissed off some doing a lot of work on the site. So this guy put up this fairly accusing apology letter, while synth was busy refusing many numerous high priced offers to purchase ffr, keep it alive, and most likely reap all the profits for his Idea (I can understand holding out).
Saddened, I still looked around and managed to DL a bootleg copy of the game files .exe, an inevitability when a game with this much community is down for so long, and I could play offline without friends or my profile.
This was ok, I could still show it to some friends who had failed to experience FFR while it was alive, but this was not full of life and fun as the original had been.
So that brings me to the present. I know I'm late getting back to the party, but last week I found out FFR had been revamped by Synth and was picked up by Konami(Sweet Studio) and was very alive today. Here I am a week later post-college playing on ffr with my original account from highschool and I can't believe it, I'm so happy that ffr is back!! But I'm still wondering what happened to the Synth and that other guy. Did they ever work things out? I really hope so.
Either way the game is a classic that I grew up with for at least a few years, and I can add it to 'the list', along with major classics like DOOM II, Halo 2, and Counter:Strike Source, as games that stand out as a crucial element and to some degree a component of myself which I used frequently during a specific part of my life...