Subspace, the pioneering MMO of the 90s

It's unlikely you've ever heard of this game, and that's a massive loss for you. Subspace was a top-down space combat game published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in the late 90s. Gameplay was pretty similar to Star Control II HyperMelee in this regard, but Subspace was groundbreaking as it really introduced the concept of an MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online game - into the mainstream. Think of it like multi-player Asteroids on speed.

Subspace's commercial launch was pretty contentious given the long period of free-play beta testing (over 2 years) - the large community of beta players objected to suddenly having to fork out £25 to continue to play online.

Once you fired up the client, connected, and logged in, you could choose an Arena, where different typs of game were playing. There were usual favourites like Capture the Flag (CTF) and Kill (melee play), as well as King of the Hill, Soccer, and Bounty Rabbit.

When you selected a zone, you then chose your ship, and got thrown straight into the action. If it was a game with 'rounds' you had to sit as an observer until that round was over, but otherwise you could jump right in.

Each ship had a certain amount of energy, and this was used for firing weapons, afterburners, and your shields. Once your energy dropped to zero, you blew up ;-)

A fairly simple premise, but it made for some very tactical gameplay. Did you have enough energy to fire your weapons *and* keep your shields for defence? Could you take down that ship or did you need to run away and recharge for a bit?

Each ship had it's own unique abilities, and some had unique weapons. For example, my favourite, the Weasel, wasn't particularly fast but could fire EMP bursts and drop EMP mines, which will reduce an enemy ships energy as well as stopping their energy recharge for a short period of time.

There'd been nothing like Subspace, and although in retail terms it did poorly, within the Internet community it was wildly popular. This lead to packed servers and frenetic, fast-paced games.

Bounty Rabbit, in particular, was always mad. One player was 'the Rabbit' - their shots did more damage, and they scored 101 points for each kill (instead of just 1). The rabbit was highlighted on the screen and radar with a special marker. The goal was to get the highest score - for the rabbit, this meant staying alive as long as possible. For everyone else, this meant kill the rabbit as quickly as possible so you could then boost your own score.

With packed maps and mines, bombs, and EMP weapons going off all around, as well as laser blasts and shrapnel, it was difficult enough to stay alive, let alone kill the rabbit as opposed to random ships clustered round him. It was fantastic fun.

In 1998, Virgin Interactive Entertainment (VIE) folded, with EA buying out most of their assets. However, EA didn't buy the Subspace assets. As the server software had been distributed on the commercial install CD, people were able to run their own private servers. An active hacking community had grown up around Subspace, largely fuelled by beta testers unhappy with having to buy the game to continue playing once it went live.

Eventually players managed to take hacks beyond simple client side cheats, and were able to realise an entire new client, called Continuum. Being able to configure Continuum with the new, private master servers, suddenly people were able to log into the new private Subspace network by default, whereas before the Subspace client tried to connect them to long-dead VIE servers.

This meant the Subspace community not only continued but also grew and thrived - it's as active now as it was in it's hey-day in the mid to late 90s.

You can grab the Continuum client for free from http://www.getcontinuum.com/

There are lots of features and aspects of Subspace that I haven't covered here - it's a very involving and highly addictive game. Install the client and give it a go - I can guarantee that within a few minutes you'll be hooked.

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