Splatterball

Splatterball was an online multiplayer paintball game played through America Online's games area in the late 1990s, during the era when premium online games billed by the hour—typically around $2 an hour—and the meter was constantly ticking. You downloaded the client and played over dial-up, part of a wave of hourly-billing multiplayer experiments that AOL offered alongside more mainstream offerings. The game was made by Mythic Entertainment, the studio founded in 1995 as Interworld Productions by Mark Jacobs and Rob Denton, then renamed Mythic in 1997. This same studio would later achieve far greater fame creating Dark Age of Camelot.

The Splatterball community formed around squads—player-run teams competing for dominance—and Mythic staff ran organized tournaments and monitored matches in real-time. It was an early taste of ranked online play: the game tracked stats and ratings, giving each player a visible rank that reflected their success. Splatterball also appeared in GameStorm, a late-90s flat-fee gaming service offering an alternative to AOL's hourly model. Around the turn of the millennium, as the hourly-billing gaming model collapsed under its own friction and flat-fee services gained traction, the game quietly faded. The community scattered, the servers wound down, and the era of paying per-hour to play online evaporated, leaving Splatterball as a capsule of internet gaming's awkward adolescence.