A Nostalgic Ramble: Online gaming services of yore

<ramble type=nostalgic>

I know we got some old timers here; how many of you remember having to
pay to play your games online?

The other day, a few friends and I were reminiscing, and we brought up
services like TEN and Kali and other programs, which were middleware
necessary to meet and play games over the new fangled internet. Even
though there were a lot of games of that era (we're talking mid to
late 90s here) that supported network multiplayer, this was either
through IPX or direct modem-to-modem connections.  The TCP/IP of the
Internet had yet to dominate as a gaming standard. This was fine if
you were gaming on the same LAN, but if you're friends were in
different cities, it wasn't really an option. As such, you often
needed software to act as an intermediary to translate. And this
software often wasn't free; the idea of advertising-supported apps had
yet to be invented.

Kali was the one I remember most, but there were others: Gamespy was
another big one, and publisher-specific platforms like Blizzard's
Battle.Net and Microsoft's MSN Gaming Zone started out serving similar
purposes. Sometimes games came built in with their own translation
software, but they tended to be specific to certain games; products
like Kali or TEN also offered chat-rooms where you could meet and then
use to play any game in your shared libraries.

Like I said, a lot of these software packages --especially the bigger
ones-- weren't free. A few were a buy-once-and-you're-good deal, but a
lot of them required monthly subscriptions to keep using. Thus, in
addition to paying for your Internet and the game, you'd also be
paying $10-15 per month for matchmaking. This added cost meant a lot
of people just didn't bother with Internet multiplayer, and those that
did tended to be siloed off from one another because there was no easy
way for Mechwarrior 2 players to meet up with Duke Nukem 3D players.

As Internet broadband phased out dial-up connections and TCP/IP
connections became the norm, software like that became less necessary.
Eventually, they were pretty much all killed by Steam, which offered
matchmaking for every game on Valve sold on the service. It's just
another way that Valve helped invigorate PC gaming.

Like I said, I best remember Kali but I'm pretty sure I tried TEN and
Gamespy. I know for a while I paid a monthly subscription for some
service (I can't remember which one though! Maybe it was HEAT.Net?
MPlayer? INN? There were a lot of them back then). I didn't stick with
it long because none of my IRL friends were on there, playing with
strangers only had limited fun, and most of the games I was interested
in supported direct IP connections anyway (even if they were trickier
to use).

But it still makes me smile remembering that this --something we now
take for granted will be included for free-- was a service we once
paid extra for. How things have changed.

Did any of you ever use these services (assuming you were gaming back
then?) Or did you avoid them because of the cost, or for other
reasons?

</ramble>