The World Opponent Network (WON or WON.net) was an online video game service, originally developed by Sierra On-Line as the Sierra Internet Gaming System (SIGS). SIGS-based and WON-based servers operated from 1996 until 2008.[1][3]
SIGS operated from late 1996 through November 1997 and was built into about 20 Sierra titles by this time.[15] On November 18, 1997, after Sierra was acquired by CUC International, CUC announced that they will rebrand SIGS as WON as of December 1, 1997.[16] On December 8, 1997, the open beta of the new WON website was launched.[17][18] WON left beta and was officially launched on April 13, 1998.[19][2]
In an apparent effort to boost WON awareness with off-the-shelf customers, Sierra released On-Line Games: Collection Series late in 1997 that contained 12 online titles (9 WON-enabled games, 2 WON.net browser-based games, plus The Realm).[20]
WON touted its success when it announced 750,000 members on September 2, 1998.[21] Just 6 months later in March 1999, WON claimed to have doubled their membership to 1.5 million, along with now attracting 1% of the WWW audience for February 1999, placing them in the top 500 websites and top 10 gaming sites.[22]
WON.net interface in Counter-Strike
WON attracted a few partnerships with significant third parties to become a multi-developer/multi-publisher service. On May 27, 1997, Sierra announced an agreement with Valve to publish and distribute Half-Life, which would bring it to WON when finally released in November 1998.[23] On May 27, 1998, WON announced an agreement with GT Interactive and Epic MegaGames to bring Unreal to WON.[19] On September 7, 1999, WON.net announced an agreement with Activision to bring a few of its multiplayer titles, including Soldier of Fortune, to WON.net.[24][25]
In August 1999, after Sierra was acquired by Havas, Havas made WON.net its own entity.[26] In September 1999, WON.net announced plans to enter Europe.[27][28] WON.net launched in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom on February 17, 2000.[29]
On March 29, 2000, Havas acquired PrizeCentral.com and merged it with WON.net, announced the creation of a new site to be called Flipside.com, and basically brought an end to the WON.net website as it was known.[30][31] Regardless, WON.net continued on in various forms (primarily for WON-enabled games minus the Hoyle titles) including becoming action.WON.net for a period.[32] Even as main pages continued to shift for WON-enabled games, many of the WON multiplayer servers continued to run—even adding a few new titles. The last WON-enabled title launched (not multiplayer but has an online element to it) was Caesar IV in September 2006.[33]
Meanwhile, in 2001, Valve (which had a publishing and distribution agreement with Sierra) was secretly working on their own competing service, Steam. Sierra and Vivendi Universal (the current owner of Sierra and WON.net) did not learn of this until March 2002 when Valve announced Steam's beta release at GDC 2002. This only added to the current rift between Sierra and Valve.[34] Shortly after the release of Steam beta, all of Valve's WON-enabled titles (Half-Life and its mods) were patched to run on Steam instead. Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004.[35][36]
Also in 2001, Raven Software took their popular title, Soldier of Fortune, off of WON.net and over to GameSpy instead.[37][38]
Many of Sierra's long-running titles were shut down on August 16, 2007.[39] The last of Sierra's and Activision's WON servers (now in the hands of Activision and Vivendi Games) were shut down on November 1, 2008.[3]
Legacy
While some of the WON-enabled titles moved to other online platforms after WON (see the list of WON-enabled games below), most of the 100 or so titles (depending on how you count expansions and Hoyle titles) have been offline since their official WON servers were shut down. A few independent efforts, however, have been made to bring some of the abandoned titles back online.
WON2
WON2 (formerly No-WON and PlanetWON2.com) is a non-commercial but closed-source project started by the Steamless CS Project Team in 2003.[40] WON2 supports, primarily, pre-Steam versions of Half-Life and its mods.[41][42] WON2 was born out of a dislike for how games were running on Steam versus WON.[43] Even though the project began with a "Steamless" port of Counter-Strike 1.6, it appears to have lasted this long because Steam forces Counter-Strike players to run version 1.6 when many fans felt that version 1.5 was better.[35][44] For example, of the 60 current servers online (April 2023), 56 of them are running Counter-Strike 1.5 (3 running Half-Life and 1 running Team Fortress).
While WON2 has a stated goal of also "focusing on other former WON games" (besides Half-Life) the only other game known to have received some attention by the project team is Silencer, but it was never launched.[40] WON2 claims to have reached its peak popularity between 2005 and 2010 with more than 1,000 servers and up to 10,000 players at a time.[40] As of April 2023, WON2 is still operational with around 400 hundred players during peak hours, and the majority of the servers hosted in China.[45] While most of the WON2 and Steamless CS Project websites are still active, the forum for the project has been down since at least August 2016.[46]
A side project to WON2 is called "Counter-Strike Beta 6.1" which uses WON2 assets to run even earlier versions of Counter-Strike.[47] As of April 2023, 11 servers for beta 6.1 and 1 server for beta 5.2 were online.[48]
NeuWon and NuWON
NuWON.Net (formerly NeuWon.com, 2014-2018) was another non-commercial but closed-source project meant to revive WON multiplayer gaming. The goal of NuWON was to support all former WON titles and not just the Half-Life family. In 2014, NeuWon sprung from a 2012 WON project on Google Code by a member of same team that created WON2, the Steamless CS Project Team.[49][50] NeuWon officially launched on March 13, 2016.[51][52] By May 2021, NuWON had listed 21 supported games (not counting Half-Life mods) plus an additional 8 that needed testing.[53] The last news post from NuWON's developer was in December 2021 (regarding working on a move to Linux) and the site disappeared in 2022.[54]
NeoEE
NeoEE sprung from the same 2012 WON project on Google Code that NeuWon did.[49] NeoEE released a server with a fully-working lobby in 2013.[55] NeoEE supports Empire Earth and its expansion, The Art of Conquest (AOC).
^"SMC Help - FAQ". Stock Market Challenge. Sierra On-Line. Archived from the original on February 5, 1997. Retrieved April 13, 2023. On 9/9/95, the system went through a major upgrade.
^"Stock Market Challenge Says Goodbye". Stock Market Challenge. Sierra On-Line. Archived from the original on April 13, 1997. Retrieved April 13, 2023. ...thank you for participating in the Sierra Internet Gaming System beta evaluation of Stock Market Challenge.
^"BETA Test Announcement". Stock Market Challenge. Sierra On-Line. October 4, 1996. Archived from the original on January 29, 1997. Retrieved April 5, 2023. To find out more about the Hoyle Internet Blackjack BETA test, press here
^"FPS: Football Pro '97 Frequently Asked Questions". Sierra Entertainment: Sports. Sierra On-Line. Archived from the original on December 19, 1996. Retrieved April 5, 2023. SIGS is currently the only method you can use to play on the internet. The problems you are encountering are currently being addressed as SIGS is still in a beta state.
^"Power Chess". Sierra Entertainment: Strategy. Sierra On-Line. Archived from the original on December 19, 1996. Retrieved April 5, 2023. If you have any trouble playing Power Chess over the Internet, check our S.I.G.S. page for a quick fix.
^"Games". Sierra Internet Gaming System. Sierra On-Line. 1997. Archived from the original on February 24, 1998. Retrieved April 24, 2023. ...we'll add even more titles before the end of 1997...
^"Games of WON.net". action.WON.net. Archived from the original on October 18, 2000. Retrieved April 25, 2023. Yep, it's a new look for WON.net ... we're your choice for contests, news, and portals to the best in multiplayer excitement — powered by flipside! ... Can't find the game you're looking for? Feel like you're lost in an old friend's new neighborhood? Favorites like Hoyle, Quick Games and Bezerk are also powered by flipside.
^Ocampo, Jason (October 5, 2006). "Caesar IV Review". GameSpot. Retrieved April 25, 2023. Caesar IV also manages to incorporate an online element into a traditionally single-player genre.
^cliffe (July 15, 2004). "WON Shutdown Timing". Steam News. Archived from the original on July 25, 2004. Retrieved April 7, 2023. Starting July 26th the shutdown of the WON authentication servers will begin. This process will be completed on July 31st.
^ abc"About". Steamless CS Project. Steamless CS Project Team. Retrieved April 26, 2023.
^Jaśkiewicz, Grzegorz (2015). "1.2.3. Charakterystyka gry Counter-Strike" [1.2.3. Characteristics of the Counter-Strike game]. Programowanie w logice jako narzędzie planowania zachowań botów w grach FPS [Logic programming as a tool for planning bot behavior in FPS games] (Doctorate thesis) (in Polish). Warsaw University of Technology. p. 20. W początkowych wersjach gry Counter-Strike rolę tej usługi pełniła sieć o nazwie WON. ... Po przejęciu roli sieci kojarzącej graczy przez wspomnianą wcześniej platformę Steam sieć WON została wyłączona, co pozostawiło wczesne wersje gry Counter-Strike bez usługi tego rodzaju. Odpowiedzią społeczności gry na to zdarzenie było stworzenie otwartego zamiennika sieci WON, o nazwie WON2, znanej też pod nazwa Steamless. [In the early versions of Counter-Strike, this service was a network called WON. ... After the aforementioned Steam platform took over the role of the matchmaking network, the WON network was disabled, leaving early versions of Counter-Strike without such a service. The game community's response to this event was to create an open source replacement for the WON network, called WON2, also known as Steamless.]
^稀饭 (August 1, 2016). "Biàngé Zhèntòng" 变革阵痛 [Pains of Change]. Ultra Console Game 游戏机实用技术 (in Simplified Chinese). No. 399. China. p. 91. 但是在最初期的时候，Steam的联机服务质量并没有达到WON的高度，许多习惯了WON流畅速度的《CS》玩家大为不满。他们甚至私下制作了补丁，让零售版的《半条命》和《反了恐精英》能够继续连接到WON的替代者no-WON(也被称为WON2)上，继续过往的联机体验。 [But in the very early days, the quality of Steam's online service did not reach the height of WON, and many CS players who were used to the smooth speed of WON were very dissatisfied. They even made a private patch so that the retail versions of Half-Life and Counter-Strike can continue to connect to WON's replacement, no-WON (also known as WON2), and continue the past online experience.]
^Heutte, Jean (November 6, 2019). "3.4.2 Le modding et le learning game 2.0" [3.4.2 Modding and the learning game 2.0]. Les fondements de l'éducation positive: Perspective psychosociale et systémique de l'apprentissage [The foundations of positive parenting : A psychosocial and systemic perspective on learning] (in French). Malakoff, France: Dunod. pp. 55, 62. ISBN9782100804986. Niveau 0 : les modders s'organisent de façon totalement indépendante des modes de productions officiels (ils peuvent être tolérés par l'éditeur ou prendre le risque d'être poursuivi en justice par l'éditeur), comme par exemple dans le cas de Counter-Strike, avec le service WON237. 37. Les parties multijoueurs de Counter-Strike sur Internet fonctionnaient à l'origine avec le service World Opponent Network (WON), qui a été fermé en 2004 avec l'arrivée de la version 1.6 du jeu, forçant les joueurs à passer sur la plateforme Steam21. Toutefois, une importante quantité de joueurs de Counter-Strike 1.5 ayant refusé le passage à la distribution Steam qu'a subi Counter-Strike avec sa version 1.6, sont restés fidèles à leur version, et face à cette obligation qui impliquait de nombreuses communications publicitaires, quelques joueurs ont créé leur propre service, appelé « WON2 » et on invité les autres à les suivre. [Level 0: modders organize themselves completely independently of official production methods (they can be tolerated by the publisher or take the risk of being sued by the publisher), as for example in the case of Counter-Strike, with the WON237 service. 37. Counter-Strike multiplayer games on the Internet originally worked with the World Opponent Network (WON) service, which was shut down in 2004 with the arrival of version 1.6 of the game, forcing players to switch to the Steam platform. However, a large number of Counter-Strike 1.5 players who refused the switch to Steam distribution that Counter-Strike forced with its version 1.6, remained faithful to their version, and faced with this obligation which involved numerous advertising communications, some players created their own service, called “WON2” and invited others to follow them.]
^"Statistics". WON2.net. Steamless CS Project Team. Retrieved April 26, 2023. 14h; Servers: 60; Players: 406
^"Information". Steamless CS Project Forums. Steamless CS Project Team. Archived from the original on August 21, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2023. Steamless CS Project Forums is currently under maintenance.
