Tunngle

» see tunngle.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The internet cafe I played in was a real LAN. A row of machines on one switch, and whatever game the room had agreed on that afternoon. Tunngle was the software version of that room, built for people who did not have the room.

By 2009, when the beta opened, I had TTNet broadband at home and the games I cared about ran their own servers. Tunngle was for the other case: the title that only ever shipped with LAN multiplayer, or the one whose official servers had been switched off years earlier. And there was the case nobody stated out loud, which was the copy that could not have talked to an official server anyway.

It worked by installing a virtual network adapter. Your machine picked up an address on a private network that Tunngle's servers stitched together across the internet, so a game scanning for players on the local subnet found the other people sitting in your channel. Channels were pre-made per game, and that detail is what separated it from Hamachi. You did not create a network and pass the password to four friends. You opened the Counter-Strike channel and there were already people in it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

About ten million accounts registered over nine years, which for a piece of networking middleware from a small German firm is a genuinely large number. It ran out of Tunngle.net GmbH with a team small enough that regulars knew the staff by name in the forums. The product itself was unglamorous, a driver and a channel list, and it kept a decade of otherwise unplayable games playable.

~ the funny part ~

A privacy law killed it. GDPR became enforceable on 25 May 2018 and Tunngle shut down on 30 April, a few weeks ahead of the deadline, with the company saying it lacked the resources and the investment to make the required changes. A service that routes other people's traffic through infrastructure it controls has real data questions to answer, and answering them properly costs legal hours that a small team on modest subscription revenue does not have.

So what ended it was not Steam, and not the slow disappearance of LAN modes from shipped games, though both of those were happening in the background the whole time. It was a compliance deadline. Ten million accounts of accumulated goodwill and a decade of keeping dead games alive, and the exit was administrative.

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