1994 · Doom / Doom II / Heretic / Duke Nukem 3D · Bob Huntley and Kee Kimbrell · Houston, Texas, USA
Before the internet was practical for gaming, ten thousand people were paying $9.95 a month to dial a phone number in Texas so they could shoot each other in Doom.
DWANGO — Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation — was founded in 1994 in Houston, Texas by Bob Huntley and Kee Kimbrell, and it is the first commercially successful competitive online gaming service. The first version shipped alongside the shareware release of Heretic. The mechanism was crude and effective: a player paid a subscription, ran the DWANGO client, and the client dialled a DWANGO server over a modem. The interface was ASCII. Once connected, players sat in a lobby, chatted, and assembled matches for the game of their choice — which in practice meant Doom, and then Doom II, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and Shadow Warrior. The crucial detail is the phone call. Initially there was one server, and it had a Houston telephone number, which meant that anyone outside the Houston local calling area was paying long-distance charges on top of the subscription in order to play. Servers in other cities followed, but even so: by early 1995, ten thousand subscribers were paying $9.95 a month, some of them dialling in from as far away as Italy and Australia. People were making international phone calls to deathmatch. DWANGO's dial-in model was rendered obsolete by the spread of the actual internet, and the service ceased operating in October 1998.
Winner: N/A — a service rather than a tournament
It is difficult to overstate what DWANGO's subscribers were willing to pay. The $9.95 monthly fee was the small part. The genuinely striking cost was the telephone call: a modem connection held open for the duration of a Doom session, billed at long-distance rates, from a household phone line that could not be used for anything else while the game was running. Somebody in Australia dialling Houston to play deathmatch in 1995 was making a decision with a real and recurring financial consequence.
They did it anyway, in numbers, which is the whole point. DWANGO is the earliest hard evidence that competitive online multiplayer was not a feature people would enjoy if it were convenient — it was something they wanted badly enough to pay through the nose for, under conditions of considerable technical friction. Every assumption the games industry now makes about online play rests on a proposition that DWANGO tested first, at $9.95 a month plus tolls.
DWANGO died of exactly the thing it had proven. The service existed because there was no practical way for two strangers to find each other and establish a low-latency connection to play a game, and it solved that problem with a phone number and a server. Within four years, the internet had solved the same problem for free, and id Software and its successors had begun building server browsers directly into their games.
The service shut down in October 1998, having demonstrated a market and then been eaten by it. Its architecture — a paid lobby, a matchmaking list, a chat room around a game — survives essentially unchanged in every multiplayer title shipped since, which is a rather better legacy than most companies get for four years of work.