luck.r52.ru was the address of the "Udacha" ("Luck") intellectual contest, a game project of the Nizhny Novgorod server R52. The home page opened with the header "Nizhny Novgorod R52 | Intellectual Contest 'Udacha' on R52"[1], and at the bottom sat the line "Copyright © 2000-2001 R52"[1], which places the contest at the turn of 2000 and 2001. The mechanics of the game are visible from the page itself: visitors were asked a question, answers were submitted through a form and collected into a "Players" table with the columns "Nickname", "Answer" and "Time of answer"[1]. All the surviving snapshots of the home page — from June 2002 to February 2003 — caught the site already stopped[1][3].

What the site looked like

The left-hand "Sections" menu consisted of seven items: "Home page", "Contest rules", "Our winners", "Archive of questions and answers", "Forum on 'Udacha'", "Murphy's Laws" and "What's on"[1]. That is, alongside the contest there lived cumulative sections — a list of winners and an archive of questions asked — as well as its own forum, an entertainment page unrelated to the game with Murphy's Laws, and a city events listing.

At the top of the page ran a clock showing the current time ("Time: 00:54:32")[1]. A separate spot was set aside for a "VIP announcements" block, empty in every snapshot, and for a link "Advertise on the server"[2]: the contest was conceived as an advertising platform as well. The host was listed as "Croupier-Whyer Elena Bezman", and next to the name stood the number 146717537, in a format resembling an ICQ number[1].

"There will be no game today"

Instead of the next task, the home page carried an appeal to the players. As the home page put it, "There will be no game today, nor will there be one tomorrow, nor the day after, and....."[1]. An explanation followed: "In our view, this resource has turned out not entirely successful. Of 50 thousand Nizhny Novgorod Internet users, no more than ten visit us"[1]. This is a rare case of a closed site naming, in its own words, both the reason for shutting down and the scale of its own traffic.

At the same time, as a farewell, the contest's mechanics were turned into a poll: in place of the game question stood "What, in your view, should a gaming resource be like?", and the submissions were promised to be taken into account and, "possibly", embodied in a new game[1]. A single line remained in the players' table: a player under the nickname Trog answered at 09:56:50, "It's a shame when something good comes to an end.."[1]. This answer, typo and all, was preserved unchanged across all three snapshots — June 2002[1], November 2002[2] and February 2003[3]: no one touched the page after that, and the poll drew no new participants.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The third-level domain in the r52.ru zone ties "Udacha" to the Nizhny Novgorod server R52.ru, and the appeal to "50 thousand Nizhny Novgorod Internet users" shows which city the project was aimed at[1]. In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s this was an attempt to make a local quiz with prizes: in the directory of the nn.ru catalog, from which the site entered our sample, it is listed as "intellectual contest Udacha on R52", "a quiz with real prizes" (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).

The contest did not take a noticeable place in the measurable indicators of the era. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, and the published results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004 contain neither the domain luck.r52.ru nor the name "Udacha"[4]. By the time of that vote, however, the game had already been out of operation for more than a year, so its absence from the list of nominees is unsurprising.

How it closed

The site left no separate farewell announcement beyond the note "There will be no game today": the page with the poll hung unchanged for at least June 2002 to February 2003[1][3]. Judging by the copyright notice, the game itself ran in 2000–2001, after which the address went on working for more than a year as a monument to itself — with a menu, a forum and an archive of questions, but no questions[1]. The last of the surviving snapshots of the home page is dated 13 February 2003[3]. According to our check, the domain luck.r52.ru no longer exists; the "new game" promised in the farewell text never appeared under this address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, June 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, November 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)