Wireplay

» see wireplay.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

for about four years british telecom was in the video game business, and not as a sponsor. bt built the network, wrote the client, ran the servers and put its own brand on the thing. wireplay was demonstrated at a consumer electronics show at earl's court in september 1995, with virtual pool and descent running against a server up in york. a public beta followed in january 1996 with fifteen hundred testers, and it opened to everybody that june.

the reason a phone company was doing this makes sense once you remember what 1996 looked like. the internet was a slow and unpredictable path between two houses. bt owned the wires. dialing a wireplay number put you on bt's own network instead of the public internet, which is how the marketing could claim a hundred and five milliseconds of lag at a time when nobody else in britain could claim any number at all. the stated requirements were a bt landline and a 9600 bit per second modem.

the launch was timed to euro 96, which england was hosting, and the euro 96 tie-in game was among the first titles with wireplay support compiled into it. that was the model throughout. the service was not a lobby you visited but a menu item inside the game itself, so support had to be built in by the publisher. by june 1998 sixty-eight games had it, doom and warcraft ii among them.

i was twelve when it launched and two years away from my first modem, in a country with no equivalent and no bt line to plug into. what turkey got instead arrived later and physically: from about 2002 the internet cafe solved the latency problem by putting everybody in the same room on the same switch. wireplay was trying to do over a phone line what we did by walking to the same building.

~ the case file ~

~ what bt actually built ~

the center of it was a notice board, which sounds quaint and was actually a manual matchmaking system. you posted an offer to play, saying which game, which difficulty, what time, and if you wanted, which specific people you were hoping to beat. if too many people accepted, the person who posted it chose. before the match started everyone sat in a lobby and talked.

on top of that bt layered leagues and knockout brackets, and let players form clubs of up to thirty with password protection. version one handled five hundred simultaneous players. version two went to a thousand and then three thousand. by 1999 there were over a thousand people connected at once on an average evening. in 1997 bt put wireplay terminals inside blockbuster video stores around the uk for people who could not run it at home, and in 1998 it staged a quake ii tournament in london called quakedelica. that december it hired garry kasparov to play four boards at once to promote a chess service. a telephone monopoly was running esports events two decades early and nobody has ever given it credit for it.

~ sold for pocket change ~

bt sold wireplay to gameplay plc at the turn of the millennium for five and a half million pounds. gameplay was a dot-com retailer with the usual dot-com balance sheet, and by mid-2001 it was selling divisions for a pound each to get them off the books. wireplay had generated losses from the day it was acquired.

in june 2001 gameplay made the five lead server administrators redundant. they kept running the service anyway, unpaid, and in august they warned that it was about to lose its connection to the internet entirely. on 31 august 2001 gameplay sold wireplay to arena technik limited for 132,500 pounds and stated in the announcement that as of the previous month the net book value of the assets was nil. a network that had cost bt years of engineering and carried a hundred thousand players changed hands for the price of a flat.

~ the unpaid years ~

it should have ended there and it took another thirteen years. wireplay carried on in a smaller shape, a community running old games on servers that somebody kept paying for, with the population that stays after everyone sensible has left. broadband made its original advantage meaningless by about 2003, so what kept people there was not latency but the fact that the same players were still there.

on monday 6 october 2014 the hosting company, by then webfusion, decided the whole arrangement was not worth it and physically removed the servers from the datacenter with almost no warning. the internet archive has wireplay.co.uk serving normally on 30 september and nothing working afterward. eighteen years, most of them run by people who were not being paid, ended in an afternoon when somebody unracked the hardware.

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