Starwave

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

~ the last words ~

In 1995 i was eleven years old and three years away from a modem, and the sport that mattered where i lived had one ball in it and no commercial breaks. Starwave made its name on baseball scores changing inside a browser window, which is about as far from a Turkish schoolboy as a website could be. The habit arrived here anyway, later and in a different language: one page open, one hand on reload, waiting for a number to move. Almost nobody who picked up that habit could have told you which company engineered it.

Paul Allen started Starwave in 1993 in Bellevue, Washington, with Mike Slade running it. The first products were CD-ROMs built around famous people, one of them with Peter Gabriel and another with Clint Eastwood. It also made Castle Infinity, generally counted as the first massively multiplayer online game aimed at children. None of that is why it matters.

The sports site launched in October 1994 under the name Satchel Sports and was renamed ESPNET SportsZone in April 1995. A premium tier cost $4.95 a month. Within three years the same company had built ABCNews.com, Outside Online and Mr. Showbiz, and had written the first website and publishing system for a financial news startup called TheStreet.com.

It never made money. Press estimates at the time put the total losses across the company's life at around sixty million dollars, which in 1998 was still a number people said out loud rather than a rounding error.

~ the record ~

~ what they actually built ~

The famous part was the scoreboard. The valuable part was underneath it. Most of the web in 1995 was a document somebody had typed and uploaded, and a document does not change while you are reading it. Starwave built the machinery that let a page be a view onto a database that was still moving, with a stats feed arriving on one side and a browser request arriving on the other.

That is an unremarkable description of a website in 2026 and it was close to unheard of then. The people who built it did not stay obscure: Geoff Reiss went on to run parts of ESPN's internet business, and Aaron LaBerge, who was on the original team, is now a technology executive at Disney. Patrick Naughton arrived from Sun, where he had been one of the engineers behind Java, and became the technical name attached to the company.

~ the deal ~

Disney bought about a third of Starwave in April 1997 and took an option on the rest, which it exercised the following spring. In June 1998 it agreed to put Starwave plus roughly seventy million dollars in cash into Infoseek, in return for about forty three percent of the search engine. The two sets of shareholders met on 18 November 1998 and the deal closed that day.

Starwave stopped existing at that point. Its people and its sites went into the joint venture, which launched the Go Network in January 1999. Disney bought the rest of Infoseek in July 1999 and folded the whole collection, search engine and news sites alike, into a single company called Go.com. That company is also on this site.

~ the legacy ~

ESPN.com is one of the largest sports properties on the internet and has been for thirty years. ABCNews.com is still there. The firm that built both was sold twice inside eighteen months and then dissolved into a portal that failed, which is a strange fate for the most successful web publisher of its decade.

Disney brought the name back in 2004 for Starwave Mobile, a casual games label that published licensed Scarface titles and picked up work from Capybara Games. That is gone too. What survives is the domain: starwave.com now redirects to disney.com, which is the corporate equivalent of a headstone with somebody else's family name on it.

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