**FAN SITE** — Three separate teams are now building third-party clients. One is crashing on purpose.
In a move that CCP has described as “continuing our commitment to player empowerment and the longevity of the EVE Online ecosystem,” the Carbon engine was open-sourced on July 1, releasing the 20-year-old codebase into the wild where it immediately became the most popular repository on GitHub among people who play exactly one video game and are extremely normal about it.
Within hours of release, the community had extracted a fully functional Space Tetris minigame buried in the test files, complete with Tetrimino rotation, line clearing, and a high score board that appears to have been last updated in 2011. A Discord channel was created. The Tetris high scores are being contested. Someone has already made a speedrun leaderboard.
Also discovered: Easter eggs from 2008 still intact, including a hidden “DICK.TASTIC” username that appears in a character creation file with no further context, a complete EVE-themed version of Snake hidden in a planet management UI panel that was never shipped to production, and literally hundreds of developer comments. The most prominent reads, in full: “// TODO: fix this never, no one will ever notice, I’m going to lunch.” The comment was left above a function that determines loot drop rates in asteroid belts. It has been there for 18 years. No consensus has been reached on whether the developer in question should be celebrated or fired.
Three separate teams have now announced they are building third-party EVE clients using the Carbon codebase. Team Obsidian is going for authenticity and stability. Team NovaCore is adding modern UI features and quality-of-life improvements. Team Heritage is explicitly building their client to crash every 90 seconds as “a tribute to the authentic legacy experience,” which has attracted a devoted following of 400 people who say it “feels like home” and “captures something real about the game.” Their Discord has posted a donation link.
CCP has not commented on the Space Tetris situation.
