PlanetQuake

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

~ the last words ~

planetquake was a download site, and in 1998 i was on a 33.6k modem. a mod was an evening you committed to, assuming the line held, which it did not always do. so i read about mods more than i ran them, and by the time my connection was good enough to stop caring, the game everybody around me was playing was counter-strike on machines in an internet cafe where somebody else had already installed everything.

the site existed because quake shipped in 1996 with the tools to take it apart. id software let people write their own game logic, and within a year there was more quake being made by players than by id. all that had to live somewhere. web hosting in 1996 was expensive and mod authors were mostly teenagers, so mark surfas started hosting the files and writing news about them, and planetquake became the address you went to for both halves.

the traffic was the business. surfas had also licensed a quake server browser called qspy, which listed live servers and your ping to each one, and put it out under the name gamespy. the site and the software grew into each other. gamespy industries came out of that, and planetquake became the first entry in what got called the planet network.

the network got large. planethalflife and planetunreal followed, then genre sites like rpgplanet and strategyplanet, each with its own writers and its own forum sitting on shared infrastructure. for a stretch around 2000 this was where pc gaming on the web actually lived, before the console magazines got their own sites working properly.

~ the record ~

~ the mod years ~

the thing planetquake was built to serve does not really exist anymore. between 1996 and 1999 a quake mod could change what the game was rather than what it looked like. team fortress turned a deathmatch shooter into a class-based objective game. threewave ctf added capture the flag to a game that had shipped without it. both were made by players, given away for free, and eventually turned into commercial work by the studios that hired their authors.

distributing that took a site with real bandwidth and somebody willing to pay for it. that is the entire reason planetquake mattered and the reason it was worth building a company around. the mods were free and the hosting was not, so whoever solved the hosting ended up owning the audience.

~ february 2013 ~

news corporation's ign bought gamespy in 2004 and the planet network became part of a much larger content operation. the sites kept their names and slowly lost their staff. ziff davis bought ign in early 2013, and on 21 february the ign president sent an internal memo announcing layoffs and the closure of 1up and ugo along with the gamespy network, so the company could concentrate on ign and askmen.

that is the death of planetquake, and it is worth keeping separate from the other gamespy ending. the matchmaking service, the middleware hundreds of games used for their server lists, stayed alive another fifteen months and was switched off on 31 may 2014. the websites and the servers died under different owners for different reasons, and people collapse the two dates constantly.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is the direction of travel. planetquake started as one person hosting files for a game he liked, and finished as a line item in a restructuring memo from a publishing company that had bought the company that had bought the company that bought it. nobody involved at the end had anything to do with quake.

the mods outlived the site. team fortress became a valve product and is still running. the files planetquake hosted are scattered across archives and fan mirrors, some of them intact and some of them now just names in a text file. what did not survive is the middle layer, the site that knew which of them were worth the download, which turns out to be the part nobody has managed to replace.

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