Origins
The 1996 release of id Software's Quake furthered the concept of gamers creating and releasing "mods" or modifications of games for use by gamers. Mark Surfas saw the need for hosting and distribution of these mods and created PlanetQuake.com - a Quake-related hosting and news site. The massive success of mods such as ThreeWave Capture the Flag catapulted PlanetQuake to huge traffic and a central position in the burgeoning gaming website scene.
Quake also marked the beginning of the Internet multiplayer real-time action game scene. However, finding a Quake server on the Internet proved difficult. Gamers could only share IP addresses of known servers between themselves or post them on gaming websites. To solve this problem, a team of three programmers (consisting of Jack "morbid" Mathews, Tim Cook, and Joe Powell) formed Spy Software and created QSpy (or QuakeSpy). This allowed the listing and searching of Quake servers available across the internet.
Surfas licensed QSpy and became the official distributor and marketer while retaining the original programming team. QSpy became QuakeSpy and went on to be bundled with id's QuakeWorld update - an unprecedented move by a top tier developer and huge validation for QuakeSpy. With the release of the Quake Engine-based game Hexen II, QuakeSpy added this game to its capabilities and was renamed GameSpy3D.
Read more about this topic: GameSpy
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)