Games That Don't Die: Operator-Independent Competitive Infrastructure for Abandoned Multiplayer Games

When an online game loses its operator, communities can revive the servers, but its competitive memory (rankings, match history, titles) dies with whoever kept the database. We ask how a ranking can outlive any operator when every match is reported by a single, untrusted community server and the game client cannot be modified. We prove that a single host's lies are unidentifiable, that only relative host honesty is observable, and that rewriting a player's rating requires controlling a majority of that player's matches, a per-player analogue of the 51% assumption of blockchains. We give detection tests with explicit guarantees, including a model-free test that abstains instead of accusing when overlap is missing, and show that trust propagation bounds what a farm of fake accounts can capture. On 1,435 real matches of Warband Premier (Mount & Blade: Warband), a lying host is caught in 97-100% of trials once it flips half of a target's losses, a joint skill-and-bias model removes half to three quarters of the rank a lie buys without flagging any honest host, and a fake-account farm's token share falls from 17% to at most 3.2%. Code and data: https://github.com/felixfrancia27/games-that-dont-die