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Total Entertainment Network

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Total Entertainment Network (TEN) was an online gaming network founded in 1991 by CEO Daniel Goldman, founder of the Inner Circle BBS, and VP Content Development Janice Linden-Reed. Greg Harper, now the President of iWin, was VP Business Development for Optigon and co-founder of TE Networks.

In 1994, Planet Optigon launched a beta of 'Total Entertainment Network via Sprint's national. This service was a community portal and casual game service, with games such as Chess, Checkers, Descent and SimCity available to its subscribers, as well as "web" based email and usenet news. Outland, founded in 1993 by William Lipa and David King was the first "game only" service on the Internet which required a paid subscription.

Kleiner Perkins, the first major investor in TEN, also invested in Concentric Networks, a low latency ISP, and Excite, a search engine and web portal.

In 1995, as part of the investment from Vinod Khosla at Kleiner Perkins Planet Optigon's eighteen employees merged with Outland's three to form TE Network. The resulting company maintained the "Total Entertainment Network" brand and the executive team of four VP's and the Chairman/CEO from Optigon were joined by the CTO from Outland. The business model for the companies shifted to serving the hardcore gamer, including connecting players to online opponents while providing a low latency connection between them. A new windows operating system based and IP based server and client were created with a greater focus on low latency. The TEN brand and management continued with new service offerings, provided online rankings, gaming tournaments, one of the first MMORPGs, the D&D based Dark Sun Online, and match-making services to gamers.

The service offered PC game players a place to play DOS and Windows-based games online with and against other players, to chat, to download game-related content, and to compete for high scores and to win tournaments. The service was bundled with many PC games and offered as a subscription service. Some of the games supported on TEN include Duke Nukem 3D, NASCAR Racing Online, Magic: The Gathering Online, ARC, AD&D's Dark Sun Online, Quake, Quake 2, Shadow Warrior, Wulfram, Warheads, Masters of Orion, Blood, WizWar, Red Alert, Command & Conquer, Panzer General, Twilight Dawn, Diablo, Warcraft, Deadlock, and Myth.

The site charged either an hourly or monthly fee for this service. The site had some exclusive content, but failed to grow quickly enough to support itself as more and more competitors began offering Internet based game services free of charge.

In 1996, TEN began its slow shift back to its roots in casual gaming. T E Network acquired Michael Riccio's WebDeck service, which offered Java-based versions of Euchre, Spades, and Hearts that ran in the popular web browsers circa 1998, to accelerate this transition. Excite was their first partner. On September 1, 1999, TEN completed its repositioning by relaunching itself as Pogo or Pogo.com.


In 2001, Pogo.com was sold to Electronic Arts.

This is a 1997 excerpt from the now-defunct TEN website (www.ten.net): written by Jason Kapulka, who went on to found PopCap, a leading developer of casual games

You've just taken the first step into the underground world of TEN. Right now, thousands of people are playing hit multiplayer games like Duke Nukem 3D, Deadlock, AD&D DARK SUN, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Diablo, Blood, and QUAKE over the Internet. Not to mention the hit games that will soon be playable over TEN such as Shadow Warrior, Twighlight Lands, and NASCAR Racing Online Series. You also get chat rooms, tournaments, game rankings to determine the best players, member profiles and more. All you need to do is install the TEN software to join in the action.

References

  1. iWin, http://www.iwin.com
  2. Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ten.net

See also

External links/Press Releases