The Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation, better known by the acronym DWANGO was an early online gaming service based in the United States.[1] The service ceased operation after 1998.
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DWANGO was the United States and Canada's first online service dedicated exclusively to DOS based multi-player gaming in the early 1990s.
DWANGO originally stood for "Doom Wide-Area Network Game Organization, being an early fee-based multiplayer server for Doom, Doom II and Heretic. It was created in early 1994 by Bob Huntley and Kee Kimbrell in Houston, Texas. The first version was released with the shareware release of Heretic by Id Software. It featured an ASCII interface requiring users to connect via dial-up modem. Once logged in, users could chat in a lobby with other gamers and create their own launchpad for the specific game of their choice. DWANGO was run through a MSDOS application which required booting up independent of Windows 3.1 into DOS mode because of hardware constraints of that era.
Since it predated widespread consumer access to the Internet, players had to dial long distance to Houston. Even so, it was wildly popular, and the creators reaped a healthy profit from the subscription fees. By early 1995, ten thousand subscribers were paying $9.95 a month, some calling from as far as Italy and Australia.
About this time, DWANGO began setting up a franchising system. A flat fee of $35,000 was charged to set up a server, and the franchisee could keep the rest of the profits. In four months, 22 servers were set up across the country.
DWANGO, headquartered in New York and had offices in Houston and Dallas, and local servers in New York City, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Denver, Houston, Long Beach, Miami, Minneapolis, Montreal, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Shreveport, and St. Louis. Servers were represented by area code as during its original inception the only way to log onto DWANGO was via a dial up modem.
DWANGO originally supported Id Software's games, and would later expand to offer games from developers and publishers such as Blizzard Entertainment and 3drealms.
With the advent of Quake came multiplayer across the Internet, and DWANGO, which had started to dwindle by late 1995, was all but dead after its release. It was formally shut down in 1998.
However, the American service would later expand to cover parts of Asia.[2] Later, the company would enter into a partnership with Microsoft and its Internet Gaming Zone.[1]
Games supported included the following:[2]
One of the widest reaching aspects of DWANGO were the semi-official DWANGO wads created by various authors. Compiled into collections by Lance Lancaster, a.k.a Aikman, an employee of IVS (the operators of DWANGO), they are still widely used amongst the Doom faithful.