MSN Gaming Zone
For a lot of people, the first place you ever played games against strangers over the internet — dial in, drop into a lobby, and play Hearts, Spades, or Age of Empires. Microsoft's online-gaming portal, and a quiet ancestor of Xbox Live.
The service that became the MSN Gaming Zone launched on August 7, 1996 — though it started life as 'The Village,' built by a company called Electric Gravity. Microsoft acquired it that year (after employee Steve Murch pitched Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on the idea) and relaunched it as the Internet Gaming Zone.
For a generation, it was the first place you played games against real strangers online. You dialed in, dropped into a lobby, and played Hearts, Spades, Checkers, Backgammon, or Bridge — the same 'Internet' card games Microsoft later bundled into Windows Me and Windows XP, all quietly connecting back to the Zone's servers. It also ran matchmaking for retail titles like Age of Empires, MechWarrior, and Rainbow Six, and the MMO Asheron's Call. By 1998 the service had around 600,000 users.
Renamed several times over the years — MSN Gaming Zone, then MSN Games and Zone.com — it slowly faded as dedicated platforms like Xbox Live and Steam took over online play. Microsoft finally shut down the bundled Windows 'Internet' games in 2019 and 2020, ending a service that, for a certain era, was simply what 'playing games online' meant.
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