TORN A 21-year-old text-based MMORPG still bringing in 100,000 daily players?
Matt Broughton just HAD to speak to Founder and CEO, Joe Chedburn, about this phenomenon
M
att: For those unfamiliar, please give us your 30 second elevator-pitch explanation of TORN. Joe: TORN is a 21-year-old text-based crime
MMORPG where over 100,000 daily players build their own story in a living, player-driven city. You can run companies, join factions, fight territory wars, trade on the stock market, import contraband, and commit increasingly elaborate crimes. It is the lovechild of old- school browser games and sandbox RPGs, with decades of grudges, alliances, betrayals, and scandals baked into its history.
Matt: Who are the people behind the game and what are their gaming backgrounds? Joe: I founded TORN in 2004 at the age of 16. I’d just left school and begun studying at community college. It was the golden age of browser RPGs. Games like Hobowars, Dark-Future, AlienAA, and Neopets were a huge part of my early teens, and beneath their simple, text-based surfaces I found a depth of gameplay I couldn’t experience through any other medium. I had little to no programming skills, but I set out to build the kind of persistent, player-driven multiplayer world I’d always
22 | MCV/DEVELOP May/June 2026
wanted to see, one defined by the unique interactions between its players. I was completely consumed by the passion of bringing it to life, and what began in my bedroom with a simple gym, gun shop, and rough crimes system has since grown into the world’s largest text-based MMORPG. Twenty-one years later, we’re a team of more than 35 full-time staff, and many of our key people came straight from the community. Our Community Manager, Joshua, played TORN for over
13 years before joining the team seven years ago, and now oversees everything from moderation and volunteer teams to player support, payments, and staff hiring. Our lead writer, Ash, has spent the last decade shaping Torn’s voice across crimes, missions, and the in-game newspaper, fundamentally reshaping the game’s atmosphere into something both entertaining and meaningful. We’ve also brought on brilliant developers from around the world, and even economists to safeguard the health of our in-game economy. Whereas some studios see high staff turnover, we’ve retained our core team, which allows TORN’s voice, visuals, and direction to stay steady while the content continues to evolve.
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