> I don't know what Yahoo did

Yahoo! goes around buying things and making them Yahoo!, like the once wonderful WebRing.org.

> (I'd never heard of FilePlanet)

FilePlanet is a huge archive of gaming files (maps, patches, mods, movies) that may well be the biggest on the internet. Then GameSpy bought it and started forcing you to get GameSpy accounts, and use fiddly download methods rather than good old fashioned linking straight to a file.

> I don't know what on-line gaming
> was like with MPlayer, and now I'll never get
> the chance to find out. GameSpy seems to do
> a really poor job based on my experience. I
> say this having never successfully played
> anything through them. That's one bit of
> software that won't be wasting space on my
> hard drive any longer.

MPlayer used to be fun. A friend of mine achieved almost world-status playing Aliens vs Predator on there, with low lag and a good ranking system. Now he's lucky if he can get into games at all

GameSpy is also the company (in)famous for the *Planet network, which began with PlanetQuake. The actual Planet sites themselves aren't too bad, but there are far too many of them. I think every webcomic worth its salt has done a joke about registering StampPlanet or PlanetFerret or something. My main gripe with GameSpy is that it doesn't actually do anything. GameSpy started off as a shareware program that would find the best Quake servers for you to play on. It was buggy and people generally hated it. Then games started coming with built-in server finders, and places like MPlayer gained popularity. There's really no reason for GameSpy to have survived, let alone flourished. Does anyone out there know why?

Matthew