Preface
update Slash & I were recently interviewed on the Crossed Wires Podcast - if you wanna hear us overwhelming the poor present...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Oh boy, remembering the patience of Velvet in the forums, and the (always angry, always loveable) amok raging about the Q3A servers.
Wireplay shutting down forced us to rethink where the community might continue (certainly wasn't going to live on Barrysworld /s), and so we learned web dev. Unbelievable to have made a career from it too.
Thanks for this article, however late i found it!
Haha, I had forgotton about Amok's rage admin mode!
"They chose to use Solaris at the server end of the system" That was a BT choice. We were using SGI Indigo 4k(?) desktop machines, which frankly wiped the floor with the Sun server-level kit, partly because of the bad design of the SPARC MMU compounded by a bad software paging subsystem. Suns were prone to thrashing at both the hardware and software level. I did the development of the Go-like coroutine-based central interchange on my Plan 9 x86 system at home and 9fs'd it across to the SGI kit in the office.
Hi Charles 👋!
Thank you for filling in a little bit of pre-history (from my point of view) 🙏, it makes a lot of sense that BT specified Sun kit at that time - it was everywhere in our DCs, for both consumer facing services (bt.com for instance!) and equipment management. Shame we never got to play with SGI toys 😁
As a nice example of karma, Plan9 file sharing protocols are now embedded in Windows Subsystem for Linux to link the native and virtual file systems...
Fantastic piece, Phil! Lovely to see all the names up there and a magical tour de force of one of the best periods in my working life. Always nice to see Oscar at events, and I have been fortunate to make contact with Richard Bartle a couple of times. I still reminisce about loads of Wireplay stuff to this day, and I still have my Quakadelica T-shirt!
Good to know that I'm still working in the industry some 20+ years later. If anyone wants to connect, then I'm on Linkedin.
Once again, thanks, Phil, for taking the time and effort to write this.
James Kaye
Hey there James! Glad you liked the piece - it's from a very inside / technical view (it would be!), I'd love to see more write ups from other perspectives too 😉
Nicely summarised Phil - an important part of online gaming history that needed documenting for future generations to marvel at...
To briefly continue the story, gameplay.com was a fun but chaotic 18 months where we (amok, graham/babyharpseal, stikky, velvet, myself) kept the FPS project going and growing whilst the commercial craziness surrounding us resulted in the company collapsing in early 2001. I well remember the five of us receiving redundancy cheques and literally running to the nearest bank (we were based in central London at this point) in case the funds ran out first!
So the five of us were jobless but not for long. Cable ISP Telewest were looking for a team with the right skills to operate their new 'blueyonder' gaming service...
eurogamer.net/article-31020
We joined en-masse in summer 2001, added Lucia/nyama to the team and swiftly grew that FPS player community dramatically, winning ‘Best Gaming Service’ in the 2002 Futurenet awards. One of our Team Fortress Classic servers even briefly ranked most popular in the world by usage according to CLQ global stats. Incidentally, Lucia/nyama and Neal/velvet were married a few years later!
What we didn’t know was that behind the scenes the company was billions in debt which led to a merger with the other national cable ISP (NTL) to form Virgin Media. In this process any group that wasn’t pulling significant income was culled. As we were hired to showcase the speed of the network (achieved!) rather than accrue huge revenues, we found ourselves cast adrift once again. And that was that. We all went our separate ways outside the gaming industry we’d all put so much into. Two redundancies in 18 months isn’t recommended but happy times nonetheless! :)
Adrian (drilla)
Yay! Drilla 😁 I have no idea how I missed this 6 months ago! Thanks for adding some later history, I did not know Neal & Lucia got hooked up 😄
Wow this takes me back... I remember when I joined the team in 1998, tasked with designing Wireplay 3.0 and running the community team till I was booted for questioning the company direction post IPO.
I learned so much from working with you guys!
The funny thing was that when I joined Sony that I discovered that their tournament system had a certain familiarity - the design was based off something I'd proposed years earlier for Wireplay (no infringements but inspired).
Oscar! Lovely to hear from you :) I knew there would be those I forgot to include - mea culpa, feel free to drop me a line with details and I'll pop them in here...Drilla did similar with his stuff about Yan and Half Life. phil.dev@ashbysoft.com
All good - was so long ago and I've lost touch with everyone too... some fun memories like having a bunch of footballers including Alan Shearer at the Actua Soccer 3 launch; and saving Counterstrke (well a bit).
Sorted - you are now canon historical material!
Only just found the blog post. Excellent read. Really brought back memories of my youth, playing on wireplay- AirAttack, Rumble In the Void, CS, etc! some familiar names I see (Amok, Stikky, Drilla, and Velvet!) Thanks.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed the memories (I certainly do too!) It was a privilege to be part of this at the time and make a bit of history :)
I'm pretty sure that 'Small Conference Room' back in 95 was actually a storage cupboard :)
Great article Phil.
Kelvin
Wow! Hello :)
Yep, it may well have been a cupboard, pretty sure there were no windows....
This was a really cool read. Those were surely heady times. It would be great to get a sequel at some point!
Thank you! The startup that was gameplay.com suffered with both the internet bubble bursting 5 months in and less-than-ideal management decisions, driven by an excess of cash and likely conflicting purposes on the board - it crashed and burned in ~18 months. I left after 12, picking up my share options (what was left of them!) on the way out, to join a consultancy company that had been formed by BT in the meantime as a way of holding on to good people (aka paying them enough outside the regulated pay bands!)... also great fun in a different way :)