DWANGO

~ the obit ~

dwango was where you played doom against a person instead of the game's own monsters, back when that meant a phone call. the name stood for dial-up wide-area network game operation. bob huntley and kee kimbrell built it in houston in early 1994, and john romero at id wrote part of the first client. really though, for about a year it was the only way to do this.

the thing charged real money. early on it was almost two dollars an hour, then it settled to about nine dollars a month. by 1995 something like ten thousand people were paying it. some of them dialed in from as far as italy and australia, long distance, just to shoot at each other in a lobby that looked like plain text. in those days that was worth the phone bill.

i came online in 1998, the same year dwango closed, so it was never a thing i could have joined. and it was an american service anyway, a paid number you called in texas. the multiplayer that reached me came later and looked nothing like it: counter-strike on a local network at the internet cafe, 2002 to 2005, no subscription, no modem dialing another city. the dwango model was already a fossil by the time i had a mouse in my hand.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

you installed the dwango client and it dialed a local number that reached one of its servers. once connected you picked a game from an ascii lobby, and it handled the modem-to-modem link so two copies of doom could see each other. it later carried duke nukem 3d and other shooters from 3d realms. the whole point was matchmaking, a place to find an opponent, which sounds trivial now and was close to magic in 1994.

~ the day it died ~

quake killed it, plainly. id shipped quake in 1996 with native internet play, so you could connect over tcp/ip with no middleman charging by the month. dwango had already started shrinking in late 1995, and after quake there was no argument left for it. it hung on a couple more years and formally shut down in 1998.

~ what it became ~

the odd part is that dwango did not fully die, it emigrated. the japanese licensee kept the name and grew into dwango co ltd, the company that would later run niconico, japan's big video site. so the brand outlived the product by decades, just on the other side of the world and in a business that had nothing to do with dialing into a doom lobby.

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