![]() ![]() Cheaters were as common as Diablo's minions.īlizzard learned fast. In Diablo, character saves were stored on the local machine, making it easy for players to hack into them before going online. Growing painsīlizzard's first big mistake with was trusting client PCs. With Diablo and StarCraft, Blizzard honed in on the importance of multiplayer to its games. Not bad for a laptop that probably wasn't much better than the one Chandler used to make spreadsheets in '95. The laptop ran the networking services for all the Starcraft matches at the premiere event, and relayed data back to the primary server. We certainly didn't start there."ī was so lean, in fact, that in 1997 Bridenbecker loaded a copy of the software onto his laptop and took it to the Starcraft world premiere event in Seattle. I had a 486DX2 myself … Over time we eventually graduated to a nice T1, and eventually we did get to a T3 45 megabits a second line, but it took longer than you might imagine. "We just didn't have these massive budgets to operate within. "Most of our systems were actually pretty crappy," Bridenbecker says. In the beginning, really had to be lean, because Blizzard was figuring things out as they went-and they didn't exactly have the most advanced technology to work with, either. In the late 90s, chatting online was still very much a novelty, and booting up Diablo and chatting with other players was the easiest way to make friends to go exploring with-just without the convenience of a friends list. In the early days of, text chat, of all things, was its biggest bottleneck. The games themselves were peer-to-peer, so had to be responsible for chat and getting those game listings up and matching players together. We didn't want it to be known, 'Wow, one computer is actually driving a few hundred thousand players all connecting at the same time.' A lot of that was because of the infrastructure on the games. "It didn't require much horsepower, which was our big trade secret. " itself, in the old days, was actually a pretty awesome piece of technology," says Bridenbecker. But with no dedicated servers, it was also an incredibly lean platform. You could log in with one username, log out, and jump right back on with another. was, more or less, a fancy IRC chatroom. One player's system would be host, and the rest would be clients-a common setup that's now largely (though not entirely) been replaced by dedicated servers. Diablo, launched in December 1996, used peer-to-peer networking. It was easy for gamers, but more importantly, it was cheap. Blizzard co-founder and CEO Michael Morhaime remembers thinking a free, easy-to-use online platform could become a feature instead of a service.ī's secret, in the early days, was how simple it really was. You'd come in and feel like you scored a victory, and then something bad would happen and you'd replay yesterday's events all over again."īlizzard has a penchant for distilling complex genres down to an approachable, polished core-WoW compared to Everquest, Heroes of the Storm compared to Dota-and even 20 years ago, it was taking a similar approach to developing an online gaming platform. With a lot of the emerging technology back then, you'd come in and there'd be a new challenge. Along the way we probably made as many wins as we did missteps. "A lot of it was guys that were super passionate about it and wanted to figure out how to do it, and we kinda learned on the job. "I'd be lying if I told you that we had a ton of experience at Blizzard at the time," Bridenbecker says. When Blizzard started building its own network platform, it had to find a way to avoid that problem. Kali worked with Warcraft 2, but because the game was designed to keep data in sync between its players, the latency of a sketchy dial-up connection could muck things up. Services like Kali (still alive today!) would essentially trick games designed for LAN play into sending data over the internet, but they required configuration and didn't play nice with all games. Playing games over the internet wasn't just novel. Most multiplayer games were played over local networks or with two PCs connected with a null modem cable, and hauling a CRT over to a friend's house wasn't easy. In 1995, AOL still charged an hourly fee and Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer. At the time, playing games over the internet wasn't just novel.
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