History
SubSpace evolved from a game originally called Sniper (1995), a project to test the effects and severity of lag in a massively multiplayer environment over dialup connections. After its creators realized its viability as an actual game, public beta testing began in February, 1996, and it became fully public later that year. The game was released commercially in December 1997 with a list price of US$27.99 for unlimited play, requiring no monthly or hourly fees. The game was originally developed by Burst, led by Jeff Petersen (aka "JeffP"), Rod Humble (aka "rodvik") and Juan Sanchez, for the US branch of the now-defunct Virgin Interactive.
When the game was officially released, it was not a commercial success due to poor marketing and the relative newness of the MMO genre. In addition, after two years of playing for free, many players refused to pay for a game that they had beta tested for two years, and instead opted for a software crack written by CLASS. The crack's popularity was bolstered by widespread irritation with delays and focus-stealing caused by the check. Later, Alex Petroukine (aka Sage386), a Russian programmer and an ex-member of United Cracking Force warez group, who also released the cheat utility Twister, released the SubSpace v1.35 client to bypass the game's CD check.
The server software had been distributed with the commercial release. Once VIE went under in 1998, many of its remaining US assets were purchased by Electronic Arts, but the SubSpace license was not. This caused all of the commercially hosted servers, including the official VIE servers, to eventually go offline permanently, and independently run servers became the only choice for hosting zones, including the old VIE zones.
Within a short time, a number of cheats in addition to Twister appeared, and commercial game hacking programs took their toll on the game as well. In response, a banning utility and new client were developed, arresting the cheating epidemic. The new BanG utility extended the banning capabilities of the server while the new client, named Continuum, largely thwarted the efforts of hackers. Continuum is now the only client permitted to connect to servers on the SubSpace Central billing server, which stores user names and passwords. In addition to security improvements, Continuum added increased media and gameplay capabilities. Citing security concerns, the authors of Continuum have declined to release its source code.
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