''BarrysWorld'' was a British

multiplayer A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...

gaming website which hosted

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

s for various video game titles. It collapsed late in 2001.

History

Originally run by a volunteer organisation, during the late 1990s and early 2000s it ran a multitude of servers for popular multiplayer games of the time including:

Counter-Strike ''Counter-Strike'' (''CS'') is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror (bombing, hostage-taking, assassination) while counter-terrorists try to preven ...

Half-Life Half-life (symbol ) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable ato ...

, Quake,

Quake II ''Quake II'' is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake (series), ''Quake'' series, but not a direct sequel to ''Quake (video game), Quake''. The game ...

Quake III ''Quake III Arena'' is a 1999 multiplayer-focused first-person shooter developed by id Software. The third installment of the ''Quake'' series, ''Arena'' differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing prima ...

, Starsiege: Tribes,

Team Fortress A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal. As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, " team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to info ...

and

Unreal Tournament ''Unreal Tournament'' is a first-person arena shooter video game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. The second installment in the ''Unreal'' series, it was first published by GT Interactive in 1999 for Microsoft Windows, and later r ...

. The website and its multiplayer servers were launched in March 1998, having evolved from several '

clan A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clans may claim descent from founding member or apical ancestor. Clans, in indigenous societies, tend to be endogamous, meaning ...

' servers previously operated by the website's creators. Around the year 1999, it started offering a pay-per-use modem dial-up service and along with supporting the free multi-player services and website, propelled Barrysworld to being the 4th largest

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

(ISP) in the UK (based on call minutes per month). While the website and free multiplayer servers proved popular, with a claimed 300,000 registered users, the organisation behind the website struggled at times to find funds for the hardware and

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

required to support such a service. As cheap flat-rate narrow-band and broadband services from more mainstream ISPs became popular and the

dot com crash The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

made venture capitalists apprehensive about funding such organizations, Barrysworld once again struggled to find funds to support its activities. While the organisation tried to support the service by offering game servers and (non-compulsory) subscriptions, by 2001 the funding crisis had forced the organisation, which by now had 35 staff, into voluntary

liquidation Liquidation is the process in accounting by which a company is brought to an end in Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and many other countries. The assets and property of the company are redistrib ...

. The venture capital company 3i had provided £1m, and guaranteed that a further £2m would be forthcoming. The company GAME.net bought the website and its assets soon after, and for the next couple of years ran the website and multiplayer service in a similar manner, hoping the multiplayer service would promote its products. In 2003 the original creators of Barrysworld parted ways from the GAME.net company and relaunched the service supported by a volunteer based organisation using a new website http://www.freddyshouse.com . The name Barrysworld is a reference to the character Barry the Time Sprout in novels by

Robert Rankin Robert Fleming Rankin (born 27 July 1949) is a prolific British author of comedic fantasy novels. Born in Parsons Green, London, he started writing in the late 1970s, and first entered the bestsellers lists with ''Snuff Fiction'' in 1999, by ...

References

{{reflist
BBC News Report 1

BBC News Report 2

External links

Original Website (no longer active)

Freddyshouse
Defunct websites Internet properties established in 1998 Multiplayer video game services