Triton

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

~ the obituary ~

In 2006 buying a game as a download was still an odd thing to do, and in Turkey it was close to unheard of. I had TTNet broadband by then and games came in boxes from a shop, with a disc in them, because paying an american website with a card was friction that most people my age were not going to accept for something they could carry home. Triton was aimed at the part of the world where that was already normal, and it was aimed there about eighteen months too early.

It started on 10 november 2004 under the name Game xStream, built by a company called Digital Interactive Streams, and was renamed Triton on 8 may 2006. The technical claim was dynamic streaming: you began playing while the rest of the game was still coming down the wire, which in a country with real broadband made a multi-gigabyte purchase feel like a rental. The catalog was mostly budget titles from Strategy First and Global Star, the kind of thing that fills a store's shelves while it waits for something people want.

Then it got Prey. 3D Realms had been promising that game since 1995 and shipped it in july 2006, and Triton was one of the places you could buy it as a download, which put a small DRM company in the same sentence as one of the year's biggest releases. Everything Triton sold phoned home to be activated, which is the standard arrangement and the one that only holds while the company that answers the phone is still in business.

~ the case file ~

~ the week it vanished ~

In early october 2006, people who had bought Prey through Triton started posting that they could not buy anything, could not activate what they already owned, and could not get a reply from support. Joe Siegler, the webmaster at 3D Realms, went looking for an explanation and came back with the answer: Triton and Digital Interactive Streams had gone out of business, suddenly and with no notice to anyone, including the publisher whose flagship game they were selling.

There was no shutdown page, no wind-down and no data export. The domain rolled over into a keyword parking page within weeks, and by november 2006 playtriton.com was a wall of search links for car insurance and debt consolidation sitting where the storefront had been. That is what a digital storefront failing actually looks like when nobody is minding it: the games do not get taken away, they just quietly stop letting you in.

~ what replaced it ~

The recovery was better than the collapse deserved. Royal O'Brien, who had been Triton's lead architect, was given permission to write a final patch that ripped the live activation out of Prey so the copies people already had could be played, backed up and restored. 3D Realms arranged for Triton buyers to get a retail copy of the game, and when Prey reached Steam in november 2006, Valve accepted Triton activation codes and handed those customers the game in a store that was still standing.

That is the part worth keeping. In 2006 the industry was still arguing about whether a purchase tied to a company's servers was a purchase at all, and Triton produced the first clean answer: it is not, unless somebody who did not sell it to you chooses to be decent about it. Every digital store since has inherited that problem, and none of them has solved it. They have only gotten better at not going out of business.

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