January 15, 1996

It would be hard to find a medium less suited than the Internet for playing twitch-finger, fast-action video games. You can die a thousand virtual deaths in a video game if you bang on your fire button and nothing happens. Yet “nothing happens” has become the chant of anyone who spends time mouse-clicking buttons on the Internet’s World Wide Web, which is slow and unpredictable on a good day.

But Internet mania has three start-up companies in the San Francisco Bay area laughing in the face of danger. The companies – Total Entertainment Network of San Francisco and Catapult Entertainment and Mpath Interactive, both based in Cupertino – are preparing Internet-based services designed to allow multiple players to engage in battle over the Internet.

The primary technical challenge for all three companies is to make the network faster and more reliable. Because the Internet was designed primarily for sending and storing E-mail and retrieving documents and graphics, its original developers did not worry much about the network’s responsiveness, a factor measured in milliseconds that is referred to as “latency.”

Latency is a critical component in video-game design and in networked applications like voice communication and video conferencing. It measures the length of time between an action – clicking an on-screen button, for example – and the resulting reaction.

Hair-trigger response time is so critical to video-game play that most of the game industry’s truly obsessed designers continue to do their best work for consoles like Nintendo and Sega, which are hard-wired for ultra-fast action.

But the growth of the home PC industry in recent years has pried loose most game manufacturers from their fixation on the console market, and now the popularity of the Internet is inspiring others to address speed and reliability problems to create a global platform for video-game fanatics.

Catapult, Mpath and Total Entertainment Network – or TEN, as it is known – share the same basic tenets. Each is building a Web-based on-line service using technology that can synchronize the play of two or more PC gamers, and will charge customers by the hour.

Each company is also cutting deals, exclusively if possible, with the biggest game developers like Accolade and Capcom, which will adapt existing games and create new ones for multiple players. And each company has its gimmicks – whether letting players swap scores and stories over the Net or providing them with creative tools to build their own Web pages.

But for all these new ventures, the most critical requirement is making the Internet responsive enough for fast, interactive game play.

The Internet is clunky today not because of its design, but because anyone can be an Internet service provider, selling access using whatever wires and routers and computers she wants, and at whatever speed she wants, with virtually no quality control.

So the trick to making the Internet safe for video games, which all three companies seem to have discovered, is to first write your own proprietary software for synchronized game play over the network and then find a way to control the network itself.

Take Catapult. After an underwhelming product introduction in 1994, it is now successfully selling its Xband modem and on-line service to connect Nintendo or Sega game players via telephone lines. Catapult (http://www.xband.com) is getting ready to sign deals with key Internet service providers to connect players to its private Internet server.

“Xband customers will then get priority connections to our high-speed backbone at key locations,” said Catapult’s president, Adam Grosser. The company plans to let a few users test its site on Feb. 1.

Mpath’s Web service (http://www.mpath.com) has chosen to use a single Internet access provider, PSInet, which has a national presence. Although Mpath will allow players to connect to its service through other Internet access companies, Mpath’s co-founder, Brian Apgar, said the company would guarantee the technical quality of the game play only for customers who use PSInet.

User tests begin next month, and Mpath intends to introduce the service nationally in May.

Taking a more open approach to Internet access, TEN (http://www.ten.net), a long-time multiplayer provider with its Macintosh-only Outland service (http://www.outland.com), is creating a set of technical instructions and an approval process for Internet providers who want to attract game-playing customers.

Daniel Goldman, president of TEN, says the new site will be up and running with 20 games by the end of March.

For those of us who are not into twitch games, the significance of these efforts transcends the limited appeal of a rollicking round of “Duke Nukem 3-D.” The compound effect of so much tweaking of the Internet’s performance could be that huge portions of the global network will see striking improvements in performance for all sorts of uses.

“What’s important from our perspective is that these twitch games are driving the service providers to upgrade their networks,” said Avram Miller, the vice president of business development at Intel Corp., which is one of Catapult’s technology partners and active in various innovations that might spur sales of faster, better computers.

Miller said that “on-line games are the first volume application that requires the same technology as video conferencing.”

And the applications go far beyond video conferencing. If companies like Catapult, Mpath and TEN make a commercial success of solving today’s network performance problems, the next generation of Internet entrepreneurs may be inspired to develop any number of wild new applications using video or voice or real-time animation – things that are nearly impossible to imagine on today’s clunky old Net.

Denise Caruso

c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service