One of Kongregates longest standing games is Platform Racing 2, released in 2008. While Platform Racing 2 still has a loyal following, the fact that a Platform Racing 3 once existed is becoming less known and in many cases, outright forgotten.
Before I get into that, let's talk about what Platform Racing is all about. It's a unique side-scrolling game with player customization at the forefront of its design. The basic premise of the game is to race other players to the end of a level. Winners get more experience towards leveling up and chances to win more character customization parts. Character levels gave you more points to distribute freely between speed, acceleration, and jump.
The original Platform Racing only offered character customization.
Platform Racing 2 introduced custom level creation using a preset set of blocks to work with and introduced "hats": singular pieces of "gear" that would grant a special ability when worn.
Platform Racing 3:
-Expanded on level customization in many ways, most notably the ability to create & customize blocks themselves, from painting their appearance to their behavior & function.
-Background/foreground painting.
-Better quality character art. As the previous installments featured stick-figure-esque character design.
-New modes like deathmatch, hat attack, and coin attack.
-Up to 8 players in a game instead of 4.
-More and better hats
-and more...
Since the demise of PR3, PR2 has been updated to also include background/foreground painting and deathmatch mode.
Platform Racing 3 was superior to its predecessor in every way, with its endless customization options that made the sky the limit, and various game-modes: so what happened and why? I can only speculate based on forum discussions I have had/read, statements made by the sole-developer Jacob Grahn, AKA Jiggmin, and my own in-game experiences.
The story goes that Sparkworkz, a game-hosting site similar to Kongregate, offered a much sweeter deal to Jiggmin than Kongregate. Unfortunately, Sparkworkz allegedly did not hold up on its deal for unknown reasons. It's speculated, due to comments made by Jiggmin, that they refused to apply Jiggmins bugfixes to game-crippling bugs that were introduced by early patches. Some have also speculated that the bugs were actually server-side on Sparkworkz's end and that there may have been conflict about who was responsible for fixing these major issues.
There were two major bugs. One crashed and froze a race at launch and the other crashed and froze during level saving or custom-block loading, causing loss of all unsaved data. Imagine spending hours on a level, only for your save to fail and erase everything or constantly having to save every five minutes and it often failing. Either way, it was an extremely trying process that few had the patience for. Then, when you finally finish a level, it crashes on launch often.
A game that once had hundreds of players logged in at any given time, dwindled down to a few over the course of a few months. Then, ultimately, it was shut down for good, and ultimately following that, Sparkworkz shut down as well. Jiggmin stated that he did not own the rights to host the game elsewhere, due to the contract with Sparkworkz.
Jiggmin once got the hopes up of many in 2015 by stating that he was learning to script in newer engines like Unity and planned on making a Platform Racing 4 for mobile. After a year of silence following that announcement, someone who claimed to be Jiggmins son once made the statement that his father was no longer working on that project and declared that the game was never going to happen. There hasn't been any word since.
Before all of the bugs, when there were hundreds of players on at any given time, I consider the game in that state to be one of the best most memorable games I have ever played. I sincerely miss the experience, and while Platform Racing 2 is still a fun game in its own right, it still pales in comparison.
There is good and bad news, however. Platform Racing 3 still lives, revived by a fan-made private server at http://pr3.goldtreeservers.net/
The bad news is that it's too little too late. The game rarely has more than a few people playing at any given time. It's nice that I can go back and refresh some nostalgia if I want, but unfortunately, the game is still dead.