Crackers, script kiddies for the most part, targeted the Zone software. In 2000, the site started to be a target of continuous crack attacks.Participate Systems was acquired by in November 2004.Ĭiting MSN's statement regarding the closure of CD-ROM games on the Zone on June 19, 2006, the Member Plus program was also disbanded at that time, due to the removal of chat capabilities from game lobbies and the end of support for the ZoneFriends client. During the volunteer program's conversion to its new management, all previous token designations were replaced with a single '+' token and a new name, the 'Member Plus', or MPlus program. In 2001, Participate Systems won the contract and would continue to lead the program until its official disbanding. Volunteer Moderators for the Zone were initially designated as members of the 'Zone Team', or zTeam, with assorted tokens assigned to five different teams: the Gaming Team (!), Helproom Team (+), Tournament Hosting Team (%), zStar Team (*), and Tech Support Team (?).īecause of legal complexities when AOL was sued by their volunteers-and the volunteers won the case-MSN Games reformed their policy by contracting a third-party company to manage the program. The idea was to have volunteers moderating chat lobbies, hosting tourneys, offering tech support, and interacting with the gamers to collect general feedback. MSN's competition with AOL Games resulted in the creation of a Volunteer Program for the Zone, which AOL also offered. Today, the site competes with other similar free-game sites, such as Yahoo! Games and. The Zone's first competitors were AOL's, as well and Sega's. It had a loyal following of players who formed friendships.įor the following 5 years, the Internet Gaming Zone would be renamed several times and would increase in popularity with the introduction of popular retail- and MMOG-games, such as UltraCorps, Age of Empires, Asheron's Call and Fighter Ace. It started with a handful of card and board games like Hearts, Spades, Checkers, Backgammon, and Bridge. The site was rebranded to 'Internet Gaming Zone' and launched in 1996.

In 1996, Steve Murch, a then-employee of Microsoft, convinced Bill Gates to acquire the small online game site, then owned by Electric Gravity. The first version of the site, which was then called 'The Village', was founded by Kevin Binkley, Ted Griggs, and Hoon Im.

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