Mplayer, referred to as Mplayer.com by 1998, was a free online PC gaming

Computer Games

"Computer Games" is a single by New Zealand group, Mi-Sex released in 1979 in Australia and New Zealand and in 1981 throughout Europe. It was the single that launched the band, and was hugely popular, particularly in Australia and New Zealand...

 service and community that operated from late 1996 until early 2001. The service at its peak was host to a community of more than 20 million visitors each month and offered more than 100 games. Some of the more popular titles available were action games like Quake, Command & Conquer

Command & Conquer

Command & Conquer, abbreviated to C&C and also known as Tiberian Dawn, is a 1995 real-time strategy computer game developed by Westwood Studios for MS-DOS and published by Virgin Interactive. It was the first of twelve games to date to be released under the Command & Conquer label, including a...

, and Rogue Spear

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear is a tactical first-person shooter computer game developed and published by Red Storm Entertainment. It is the sequel to the critically acclaimed Rainbow Six game based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name....

, as well as classic card and board for more casual gamers. Servers and matchmaking was provided through a proprietary client. Initially, the service was subscription-based, but by early 1997, they became the first major multiplayer community to offer games to be played online through their network for free. This was done by relying on advertisement-based revenues.

Mplayer was a unit of Mpath Interactive, a Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

-based startup. The demand for online gaming in the late 1990s resulted in huge growth for the service. They became known for supplying a range of features integrated through their software, including their very successful voice chat feature. This feature proved so popular that it was later split off as a VoIP service to cater to non-gamers, dubbed HearMe, which would eventually become the new name of the company. The company was listed on NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 as MPTH and later HEAR.

Despite the impressive growth of their gaming unit, Mplayer was never profitable. HearMe continued to refocus themselves on VoIP technologies and, in late 2000, had sold off Mplayer to GameSpy

GameSpy

GameSpy Industries, Inc., known simply as GameSpy, is a division of IGN Entertainment, which operates a network of game websites and provides online video game-related services and software. GameSpy dates back to the 1996 release of an internet Quake server search program named QSpy. The current...

, who had a competing online multiplayer service, in a mixed cash and stock deal. Some of its technologies were also sold to 4anything.com. HearMe survived the buyout and continued to operate independently. Mplayer was taken offline and integrated into GameSpy Arcade

GameSpy Arcade

GameSpy Arcade is a shareware multiplayer game server browsing utility. GameSpy Arcade allows players to view and connect to available multiplayer games, and chat with other users of the service. It was initially released by GameSpy Industries, a division of IGN Entertainment, in early 2000, to...

 in 2001.

Company

The company first began as Mpath Interactive, a venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 start-up

Startup company

A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...

 co-founded in early 1995 by Brian Apgar, Jeff Rothschild and Brian Moriarty

Brian Moriarty

Brian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer , Trinity and Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor ....

, based in Cupertino

Cupertino, California

Cupertino is an affluent suburban city in Santa Clara County, California in the U.S., directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 58,302 at the time of the 2010 census. Forbes...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. It was later renamed to HearMe. Mpath Interactive later moved to Mountain View, California

Mountain View, California

-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...

, after acquiring Catapult Entertainment, Inc., and their online gaming service XBAND

XBAND

XBAND was an early online console gaming network for SNES and Sega Genesis systems. It was produced by Catapult Entertainment, a Cupertino, California based software company, and made its debut in various areas of the United States in late 1994 and 1995...

. Mplayer began as a division in October 1996 to provide online gaming to subscribed users. A few months prior to launching Mplayer, Mpath announced their goal for the service in a job description:

Not only will people go to the Internet for information, they will also go to it to meet and interact with other people. Mplayer, scheduled to debut 1996, will bring the excitement of real-time multi-player gaming to the Internet's World Wide Web for the first time. It will feature popular PC-based games from well-known game publishers. Mplayer's features will include voice-capable games and chat rooms where players can converse as they play the games, watch games in progress and choose teams or opponents.

In February 1997, they began to offer internet play for free for their major commercial games such as Quake, as well as card and board games such as Scrabble

Scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works provide a list...

 and Spades

Spades

Spades is a partnership trick-taking card game devised in the United States in the 1930s, in which the object is for each pair or partnership to take at least the number of tricks they bid on before play began. Spades is a descendant of the Whist family of card games, which also includes Bridge,...

. In this, they were one of the first major commercial communities on the internet to offer such a service. They continued to add many new games to their offering. The slogan that was used from its founding was "Wanna Play?" By the end of 1998, the company had a staff of 111 employees, and about 80 by late 2000. The company was listed on NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 beginning April 29, 1999 as MPTH, which changed to HEAR by late September of the same year.

Revenues

Games first offered over Mplayer were by subscription. In addition to the Gaming Service, Mpath also launched a "preferred" ISP service, WebBullet, reselling InterRamp ISP accounts on the PSINet network, the very backbone which Mplayer.com's production services were hosted on. By 1997, their growth allowed the service to be offered for free through support of its advertising network, which eventually became known as the Mplayer Entertainment Network. However, the subscription model was retained, known as Plus, and gave special privileges to these member who subscribed. The yearly rate was USD $39.95, or $29.95 for two years, this gave access to certain games, their rating and ranking system in Quake and Quake II, as well as online tournaments.

Much of the Plus service offering was misunderstood, due in part to a lack of clear explanation of its benefits, but just as much to the unwillingness of the Customers to learn the details. Many believed the appeal of a Plus account was simply the prestige associated with it, as users who had Plus had their name appear in gold. There was a great amount of criticism received by the Support staff that without Plus, they could not play some of the more popular games such as Quake. It was an uphill battle getting the userbase to understand the nuances, and many thousands of emails were received lamenting the Subscription model.

While certain releases were kept as "Plus Only" features for a brief time, in many cases the Plus game rooms were simply games hosted by Mplayer's own servers. With the rapid growth of Quake fans, and the increased server load, Mplayer opened the door to the QuakeWorld

QuakeWorld

QuakeWorld is an update to id Software's seminal multiplayer deathmatch game, Quake, that enhances the game's multiplayer features to allow people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on Internet game servers...

 network, exponentially increasing the amount of available game servers, and offering someone a chance to get a faster connection to a game. The downside was that there was very little control of Cheat codes in these systems. Mplayer tried to increase the appeal of the Plus subscription, offering a "secure" Mplayer owned Server hosted Game, and offering Rankings and customizable Clan Skins.

With the Internet user demographic changing, a growing market emerged for classic games, with Scrabble and Battleship leading the charge. Mplayer turned more into an aggregator, hoping to attract as many users as possible with free, ad-supported games and software, including Checkers, Othello, and Chess.

Despite this, the company had been losing money, $11.9 million in 1998 alone, and by late 1999, had yet to break even. MPath was forced to look toward different venues. Proprietary technologies that were developed as features for Mplayer, known internally as POP.X, were later licensed to third parties. This was meant to help other companies create their own internet communities using existing technology. Third parties that licensed this technology included companies like Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

 and Fujitsu

Fujitsu

is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....

. HearMe, the internal audio chat feature in Mplayer that was later split off, eventually accounted for 50% of all of the company's revenues.

Growth

Mplayer began as online gaming was still in its infancy. That along with their initial subscription fee that was required to use its service limited its early growth. Mplayer gained popularity after making its service available for free to all users in early 1997, and by early 1998 had attracted more than 125,000 monthly visitors and 400,000 total members. The entire network had averaged 800,000 hours of gameplay each month, with each member averaging 15 sessions a month for 35 minutes each time. By the end of that year, Mplayer had 2 million total registered users. By March 1999, Mplayer had over 3 million total users, and over 80,000 unique daily visitors, averaging over 300 minutes of gameplay each. Mplayer saw some of its biggest growth during this period, with more than 200 million total minutes of gameplay per month beginning in 1999. According to internal data from HearMe at the time, Mplayer.com was the tenth most popular site on the internet in terms of total monthly usage time.

The huge growth of Mplayer was closely associated with the growth in the internet in the late 1990s that culminated in the dot com boom. This was seen in their first day of being publicly traded when their IPO nearly doubled. By the time of the buyout by GameSpy not long after, the service had over 10 million registered members, and 20 million unique visitors per month.

HearMe

HearMe.com was launched in January 1999 following the success of Mplayer. Mpath intended to expand their market from entertainment using money that was being made through Mplayer to create a VOIP communications network. The technology used was based on the lucrative audio chat software used within Mplayer. HearMe.com's website featured wildly popular and free voice and video-conferencing chatrooms, as well as free HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 (ActiveX

ActiveX

ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....

) code that would allow one to add a voicechat module directly to their own website and speak with visitors in realtime. The new business became successful to the point where the entire company decided to refocus itself on this market, and this unit was not part of the buyout. In late September 1999, Mpath Interactive bought Resounding Technology, Inc, maker of Roger Wilco

Roger Wilco (software)

Roger Wilco is a Voice over IP application used by multiplayer video game players, usually in combination with a headset. The name is derived from a common voice procedure in two-way radio. Roger stands for "I understand what you just said" and wilco is short for "will comply"...

, another audio chat program. HearMe continued to release updates of the software until mid 2000 when HearMe saw its end and went out of business. However in late 2000 a deal with PalTalk emerged, where PalTalk assumed all rights to HearMe's technology. It was later implemented into GameSpy Arcade.

Games

Mplayer offered a variety of game types to play online, including fast-paced action games, sports games, card and board games, amongst other types of games. Until late 1997, Mplayer had a lineup of about 20 games, with some of their more popular ones being Quake, Red Alert

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Command & Conquer: Red Alert is a real-time strategy computer game of the Command & Conquer franchise, produced by Westwood Studios and released by Virgin Interactive in...

, Diablo

Diablo (video game)

Diablo is a dark fantasy-themed action role-playing game developed by Blizzard North and released by Blizzard Entertainment on December 31, 1996....

, and Scrabble

Scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works provide a list...

. In October 1997, it was announced that they would add more than 30 new games to their roster, making it the largest offering of any online gaming service at the time. The company wanted to diversify their market, and brought in many new types of games, such as Cavedog's Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation is a real-time strategy video game created by Cavedog Entertainment, a sub-division of Humongous Entertainment, and released on September 30, 1997 by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. It was the first RTS game to feature 3D units and terrain...

and a host of new card games to attract more casual gamers. In a deal with Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

, Mpath introduced an entirely new section of games dedicated to sports. The new section was meant to accommodate sports gamers, as well as online tournaments and sport news and statistics.

The main commercial games were divided by channels into action, strategy, sims, and role-playing. Their popularity generally came down to the individual game rather than the type of game. Indeed, some games would often be too underpopulated to support matchmaking, while other more popular games would have a thriving community of hundreds or thousands of gamers. Competition of online matchmaking services for computer games had been increasing by the late 1990s. Mpath attempted to ensure that it stay up to date with the latest and most popular games being released. Some games like Quake II

Quake II

Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...

, Daikatana

Daikatana

John Romero's Daikatana, or simply Daikatana, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Ion Storm and published by Eidos Interactive. Released on May 23, 2000 for Windows, it was led by John Romero. The game is known as one of the major commercial failures of the computer game industry....

and Unreal

Unreal

Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive in May 1998...

were all heavily promoted as being available for online play even before their launch.

A popular feature was the ability to download shareware versions of some games and play them online. For some games, this was supported by publishers as a means to promote their games at retail. In other cases, Mplayer arranged deals with developers to attract gamers with demos of popular games such as Quake and Unreal. The card and board games offered were supplied straight from Mplayer for free through their own software.

Mplayer community

Mplayer was perhaps best known for its large community of gamers. While there were many similar services, Mplayer's software features and diverse offering of games and features quickly led to a highly organized environment where clans and tournaments thrived. Mpath also did a lot to support this, between adding new games and holding occasional contests with prizes. Mplayer's fan base however, had become largely self-sustaining, and to an extent only loosely moderated. Experienced users would volunteer, known as Sages, to help newer users with any difficulties that may arise with the service or frequently asked questions. Normally this was done through a special chat lobby during peak hours of the day. Wizards were also volunteer users, but would represent Mplayer in daily events that they would host and organize, and often participate in. GameGods officially represented Mplayer and also assisted the community. All three of these received a special icon before their name to recognize their status.

For the most part, the community reaction to Mplayer was fairly positive. One of the biggest complaints was of lag

Lag

Lag is a common word meaning to fail to keep up or to fall behind. In real-time applications, the term is used when the application fails to respond in a timely fashion to inputs...

, which was highly inconsistent, often affecting some users and not others. Particularly in faster-paced games, this caused problems for attempts to organize official tournaments. Additionally there were some complaints of an intrusive interface.

Competition

Mplayer was formed when there were few major online gaming services. Notable competitors were Heat.net (built on a licensed version of Mplayer's core technology), Total Entertainment Network

Total Entertainment Network

Total Entertainment Network was an online gaming service that existed from September, 1996 until October, 1999. T E Network, Inc., which created and operated the TEN service, was formed from the merger of Optigon Interactive and Outland in June, 1995 when they received their first round of venture...

, Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's Internet Gaming Zone (later MSN Gaming Zone), GameSpy3D, Kali

Kali (game browser)

Kali is an IPX network emulator for DOS and Windows, enabling legacy multiplayer games to work over a modern TCP/IP network such as the Internet. Later versions of the software also functioned as a server browser for games that natively supported TCP/IP. Versions were also created for OS2 and Mac,...

, and Sierra

Sierra Entertainment

Sierra Entertainment Inc. was an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams...

's Won.net

Won

Won or WON may refer to:*The Korean won from 1902–1910:**South Korean won, the currency of the Republic of Korea**North Korean won, the currency of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea* Won , the Korean form of Yuan...

. Another popular service was Battle.net

Battle.net

Battle.net is a gaming service provided by Blizzard Entertainment. Battle.net was launched in November 30, 1996 with the release of Blizzard's action-RPG Diablo. Battle.net was the first online gaming service incorporated directly into the games that make use of it, in contrast to the external...

, which was used for all games made by Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded on February 8, 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse by three graduates of UCLA, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce and currently owned by French company Activision Blizzard...

, starting with Diablo

Diablo (video game)

Diablo is a dark fantasy-themed action role-playing game developed by Blizzard North and released by Blizzard Entertainment on December 31, 1996....

. This trend of each game providing their own community on which to play their games online had become increasingly popular in the late 1990s. Furthermore, Mplayer's offering of card and board games had been countered by numerous sites across the internet, including by services like from Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 and GameStorm

GameStorm

GameStorm was an online gaming service founded by Kesmai corporation in the 1990s. It offered several online video games at a flat monthly fee of $10 per month, a relatively radical payment system in the age of pay-by-hour online gaming...

.

Marketing

Mplayer's first business model in online gaming was to charge gamers to play. However success was limited, and the company shortly after changed their marketing direction toward offering online play for free with supported advertising. The CEO of Mpath Interactive at the time, Paul Matteucci, put it: "It wasn't until we really got it – that it was about building a community around the games – that Mplayer.com took off," speaking on making the games free. It was from here that their model would begin to be based more around the actual community of gamers, and Mplayer would see its number of players climb several-fold. Soon after, Mplayer had become a well-known player in the online gaming industry. As such, most of their marketing was geared toward attracting new gamers through a broader offering of games, as well as taking advantage of the large community they already had. The former can be seen in the hype surrounding the release of high-profile games of the time such as Unreal and Quake II, both of which were to be offered online through Mplayer.com. They also used their Plus service to cater to the more hardcore gamers who did not mind the extra fee. One source describes their presence at E3 2000:

E-3 2000, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in May 2000, was a multimedia extravaganza. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the room-sized exhibit housing Mplayer.com, the premier on-line multiplayer gaming service. And, if the multimedia electronic action didn't grab your attention, the exhibit itself was sure to. Here was a mega multimedia presentation all its own. The exhibit, costing tens of thousands of dollars to design, fabricate, and install, occupied 1000 square feet (92.9 m²) on three raised floors, where fanatic gamers battled it out on a dozen big-screen overhead monitors...The design and construction represented an engineering marvel. Nothing had been left to chance in the exhibit's design.

By creating such an extravagant exhibit at e3, the largest gaming exposition, they sent a message that Mplayer was a major player in the gaming industry. Moreover, Even at this late date, months before the buyout by GameSpy, Mpath was still aggressively marketing Mplayer. This was despite criticisms that splitting off HearMe took the company's focus away from gaming.

Software

Service was provided through proprietary software, a channel-based lobby and matchmaking client known as gizmo. The design and interface of gizmo was outsourced to two design companies, Good Dog Design and Naima Productions. Upon launching the program, users would choose from a list of games, that would then take them to a universal lobby for that game. From there, users could create their own game channel that would be displayed to everyone. They could also join a created game. The lobby would show a list of rooms, ordered from least to most latency. Green rooms indicate games that were fast enough to be playable, while red rooms were unplayable. The rocket icon indicated the game had been launched. This would bring them to a second private chatroom before entering the game. The channel creator acted as the moderator, who could launch the game and ban players in the lobby as well as change game settings, but could also make someone else a moderator. In some games like Quake, you could join the game after it was launched, but for most you could not.

Features

Mpath integrated many features into Mplayer in an attempt to stay competitive and support its community. Most of these features came with an update to Gizmo in December 1997, among them were voice chat, a chalkboard system in game channels that anyone could view known as ScribbleTalk, a built-in browser known as WebViewer, personal messaging, as well a ratings and rankings system for Plus members. The voice chat only allowed one person to speak at a time, but became extremely successful to the point where half of all Mplayer's service usage was from voice chat. Mpath soon after split off a division to focus on VoIP technologies in early 1999 catering to non-gamers. Ranked games were played in a separate lobby than normal games. Ranking was determined how well you played relative to your opponent's rank. In some games, this rank was only provisional until you played a certain amount of games. Later on, the rank icon only appeared after enough games were played. Users could also customize their profiles by choosing a portrait from a set of pictures and edit their profile with HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, however this latter feature was removed in later versions of gizmo.

GameSpy buyout

Despite its success in attracting users, Mplayer was still in financial trouble in late 2000, and it had been speculated the division would be sold off, possibly to Sega

Sega

, usually styled as SEGA, is a multinational video game software developer and an arcade software and hardware development company headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, with various offices around the world...

, owner of Heat.net. However it was announced in December 2000 that GameSpy, an Irvine

Irvine, California

Irvine is a suburban incorporated city in Orange County, California, United States. It is a planned city, mainly developed by the Irvine Company since the 1960s. Formally incorporated on December 28, 1971, the city has a population of 212,375 as of the 2010 census. However, the California...

-based gaming site founded in 1996, made a deal to acquire Mplayer from HearMe. The two companies had fully merged by June 2001. Included in the deal was the Mplayer POP.X business unit and gaming service, as well as its Globalrankings system, which ranked players in game, and the Mplayer Entertainment Network, their advertising network. This was all sold off by HearMe for USD $20 million and a 10% stake in GameSpy. HearMe was willing to sell off its entertainment division to focus on its more profitable VoIP unit, while GameSpy wanted Mplayer's userbase for its own multiplayer gaming community. There was also the belief at GameSpy that HearMe had been neglecting the service in favor of its other ventures. At the time, GameSpy was looking to start over from its GameSpy3D service with GameSpy Arcade, which was then in beta. Only a few months after the acquisition, many features from Mplayer had been added to their new service.

Some of Mplayer's technologies were sold off to 4Anything.com, an ad-based city guide network of domains that used Mplayer's voice and chat technologies to create its own service known as LIvVE.com.