GameStorm

» see gamestorm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ten dollars a month, everything included. In November 1997 that was close to a provocation. Online gaming was still billed the way online anything had been billed since the CompuServe days, by the connected hour, and the meter was the reason people played carefully. GameStorm turned the meter off.

The company behind it was Kesmai, founded in 1981 in Charlottesville, Virginia by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, and it had a longer claim on this than almost anyone. Air Warrior went live on GEnie in 1987, a combat flight simulator where the other aircraft were other people, which makes it one of the first graphical massively multiplayer games ever run as a business. Island of Kesmai had been running on CompuServe before that. News Corp bought the company in 1994.

GameStorm was Kesmai's attempt to stop renting shelf space from the online services and own the customer directly. It launched as a joint venture, so a subscription reached Kesmai's own catalog and, through the same login, everything sitting on Heat.net and Engage. Mythic Entertainment's titles came through the same door, Dragon's Gate and Aliens Online among them.

In November 1997 I was thirteen and about a year off my first modem. When I did get online, at home in Turkey, the connection was billed by the minute as a local call, and that was the meter that shaped everything. A flat monthly fee for unlimited play solves a problem American players had and Turkish ones did not, because the expensive clock was never the service's. It belonged to the phone company. Playing something for four hours because the price was identical either way did not become thinkable here until broadband arrived, and by then GameStorm had been closed for five years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a flat fee meant ~

Per-hour billing shapes a game harder than any decision inside the game. If the clock is running you do not explore and you do not sit in a lobby talking to anybody. Every minute has a number attached to it, and the number arrives later on a bill that somebody's parents will read.

Ten dollars a month took that away, and what it bought was not more play so much as a different kind of play: hanging around watching other people, or being bad at a flight simulator for a week before getting any good at it. The subscription MMO that took over the following decade ran on exactly this economics. GameStorm got there first and got nothing for it.

~ the shared login ~

The venture structure is what dates it hardest. In 1997 nobody assumed a game would carry its own network. Publishers built services and then pooled them. A GameStorm subscription also opened Sega's Heat.net along with Engage, so one account reached across companies that were otherwise competing.

That arrangement had about eighteen months of sense in it. Then Ultima Online and EverQuest shipped with their own servers and their own billing, and the middleman service had nothing left to sell. Kesmai also spent 1997 and 1998 suing AOL, which had bought CompuServe and reorganized its games channel in a way that pushed Kesmai's titles behind AOL's own. The suit settled quietly in July 1998 on undisclosed terms.

~ what ea closed ~

Electronic Arts announced its agreement to buy Kesmai from News Corp on 22 November 1999. What EA wanted was EA.com. What it did with the purchase was shut most of it down. Closures for the older Kesmai titles including Air Warrior Classic and Legends of Kesmai were announced in May 2000, and the studios went in 2001. Some of the staff stayed in the same Charlottesville offices under EA, and later under Maxis East.

The archive holds the shape of the ending better than any writeup does. The front page of gamestorm.com ran at around 3,500 bytes through 2000, then shrank across the first half of 2001 as things came off it, down to 2,313 bytes on 6 July. That last version is mostly an iframe pointed at an ad server. By 22 January 2002 the address was a redirect, and it never served a page of its own again.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »