Mplayer.com

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

~ the obit ~

mplayer was a us thing at the dial-in layer. you needed a phone-friendly tcp/ip path to mpath's matchmaking servers in cupertino, with a voice-chat client tuned for the modem-grade latency that came with north american telephone infrastructure. in turkey around 1998-2000 the multiplayer story was a counter-strike server in an internet cafe in ankara, with everybody on the same lan and shouting at each other across a row of crts. that is what online gaming meant to us. mplayer might as well have been on a different planet.

mpath interactive launched mplayer.com in october 1996 as a paid service. by early 1997 the model had flipped to ad-supported, and registrations took off. the pitch was straightforward. you installed the mplayer client and picked a game. mplayer found you opponents and put you in a voice chat room with them while you played. for 1997 that experience was years ahead of what battle.net or anything else was offering.

by 1999 mplayer had over 3 million registered users and was claiming peaks of 20 million unique visitors a month. the catalog ran from quake and command & conquer to a long tail of scrabble and chess for users who did not want a shooter. the voice chat was so much better than anything bundled with the games themselves that mpath spun it out as hearme, a separate company offering voice chat as a paid service to website operators. that pivot turned out badly.

the dot-com correction hit hearme first. its enterprise customers stopped paying in 2000, and hearme went out of business by mid-year. mpath, by then renamed hearme inc, sold the mplayer.com property to gamespy in december 2000 for $20 million plus a 10% equity stake. gamespy ran mplayer in parallel with its own service for six months, then folded the user base into gamespy arcade in june 2001. mplayer.com as a destination disappeared.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the mplayer experience in 1997 was the bundle. their gizmo client handled matchmaking by skill range and ran voice chat over the same connection that hosted the game itself. on a 56k modem it actually worked, mostly. the ranking ladders kept score. each of those pieces existed elsewhere on the web, but nobody had put them in one client until mpath did.

the games catalog reached over a hundred titles at peak, with quake and command & conquer as the headliners. id software's quakeworld basically lived on mplayer through 1998. mplayer is also where a generation of pc players first heard their opponents' voices in real time, before voice was a normal feature of the game itself. that experience is what the next twenty years of online shooter culture inherited.

~ the funny part ~

the voice chat was so good that mpath thought it had a bigger business outside gaming. in 1999 the company spun the voice technology out as hearme and renamed itself to match, betting that every consumer website would want voice chat embedded on the page next to its content. that bet was wrong by about twenty years. when voice chat came back in the 2010s, it came back as discord, and discord owed nothing to mplayer except possibly an idea about what gamers wanted.

~ what got buried with it ~

gamespy bought mplayer.com in december 2000 for twenty million dollars plus a ten-percent equity stake in the new company. by june 2001 mplayer had been folded into gamespy arcade, the gamespy-branded matchmaking app, and the mplayer brand was retired. gamespy itself was eventually killed too, in 2014 when ign shut down its master server, and that took the gamespy version of mplayer's user base offline alongside everything else gamespy had absorbed.

the gamespy collapse is the more interesting bookend. by the time ign pulled the plug on the matchmaking servers in 2014, the entire generation of dial-up multiplayer infrastructure that mplayer had been the leader of in 1997 had already been replaced by steam and the console networks that came after. mplayer's contribution survived in the basic design assumptions about what an online matchmaking client should do. the brand died twice, but the design lived on without anyone needing to remember where it came from.

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