MSN Gaming Zone

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

~ the obituary ~

msn gaming zone started life as "the village," a small lobby system that electric gravity built in 1996 for online card games. microsoft bought it that same year and rebranded it as the internet gaming zone. it became the official matchmaking lobby for microsoft-published pc games over the next decade. asheron's call, allegiance, mechwarrior 4, and the network play side of age of empires all routed through the zone. by the early 2000s the brand had simplified to zone.com.

the second life of the zone was less visible but more widespread. the windows me copy of internet hearts, internet spades, internet checkers, and internet backgammon was a thin client that opened a connection to zone.com servers. windows xp shipped the same set. for a lot of people who had never heard of msn gaming zone the brand, the actual servers behind "internet hearts" on the start menu were that platform.

the first time i heard of msn gaming zone the brand was years after it stopped mattering. in turkey from 2002 to 2005, the gaming online was counter-strike at the internet cafe and msn messenger at home. the zone was a us-coded service in two senses. the premium games it hosted were anglophone, and the bundled internet hearts client was the kind of thing that ran in the background while a sibling did homework rather than something anyone remembered as a service. it was a distance i can verify only by reading old microsoft change logs.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

the zone's original promise in 1996 was that you did not need to configure ip addresses or telephone modem strings to play someone over the internet. the lobby took care of matchmaking. you started a session in your game, the zone hooked you up with someone else who was waiting. for any pc gamer who had spent the early 1990s configuring null-modem cables and ipx-over-tcp wrappers, that was a different experience. the zone for the first time made online pc gaming look like console online gaming would look five years later.

~ what came after ~

the inheritance from msn gaming zone went two directions. the premium-game side passed to xbox live around 2002, when microsoft was building the xbox 360 era and consolidated everything competitive online into one stack. the casual-game side became msn games, the single-page web portal that still runs at zone.msn.com today. some of the bigger games migrated to xbox live arcade, but internet hearts did not have a successor at all. when microsoft killed the windows 7 version in january 2020, that was the brand's last service-side product.

~ the long tail ~

the long tail of msn gaming zone is mostly the matchmaking servers. microsoft's own announcement of the windows 7 internet hearts shutdown in january 2020 went out as a blog post that fans treated as the actual death of the brand, fourteen years after the cd-rom matchmaking layer had already been turned off. asheron's call ran on msn-related infrastructure into 2017 and survives in 2026 only as private servers run by ex-players. the zone domain still resolves: zone.msn.com is currently a generic flash-replacement portal of html5 casual games. the lobby version of the brand has been dead since 2006.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »