Total Entertainment Network (TEN) was an online gaming service that existed from September 1996 until October 1999. T E Network, Inc., which created and operated the TEN service, was formed from the merger of Optigon Interactive and Outland in June 1995 when they received their first round of

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

funding from

Vinod Khosla Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas suc ...

, a general partner at

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...

History

Total Entertainment Network was the first online gaming provider to go live. Operating out of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, the service offered PC game players a place to play

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

-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. The games supported on TEN include ''

Duke Nukem 3D ''Duke Nukem 3D'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by 3D Realms. It is a sequel to the platform games ''Duke Nukem'' and ''Duke Nukem II'', published by 3D Realms. ''Duke Nukem 3D'' features the adventures of the titular Duke Nuke ...

'', NASCAR Racing Online Series, '' Quake'', ''

Command & Conquer ''Command & Conquer'' (''C&C'') is a real-time strategy (RTS) video game franchise, first developed by Westwood Studios. The first game was one of the earliest of the RTS genre, itself based on Westwood Studios' influential strategy game ''Dune I ...

'', ''

Panzer General ''Panzer General'' is a 1994 computer wargame developed and published by Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI). It simulates conflict during World War II. The designers of ''Panzer General'' were heavily influenced by the Japanese wargame series '' ...

'', and ''Big Red Racing''. Many online games, especially PC games adapted for online game play, require low and consistent latency to play well. It was a major challenge circa 1996 for consumers to find consistent

low-latency Latency, from a general point of view, is a time delay between the cause and the effect of some physical change in the system being observed. Lag, as it is known in gaming circles, refers to the latency between the input to a simulation and ...

connections to central servers or to other game players because of the latency intrinsic to dial-up

modems A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

and the heavy congestion at the

Internet peering point In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill-and ...

s. T E Network, Inc. partnered with Concentric Network Corporation to offer consumers Internet access dial-up numbers that would provide the reliable low latencies they needed to play online games. Concentric optimized their network and their dial-up technology for the TEN service. Concentric also received

venture capital financing Venture capital financing is a type of funding by venture capital. It is private equity capital that can be provided at various stages or funding rounds. Common funding rounds include early-stage seed funding in high-potential, growth companies ( ...

from

. Even with the combined revenues of subscriptions and advertising, TEN remained unprofitable, failing to reach the critical mass numbers of subscribers needed to cover their costs. After the success of

Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduat ...

's free Battle.net service for Diablo and their claim that offering online play as a feature of the game boosted retail sales by 10%, PC game publishers started following Blizzard's lead and offering free online game play. This undermined the

subscription business model The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, an ...

of TEN and their strategy to be the exclusive place to play popular PC games online. As Internet advertising was starting to gain traction, T E Network decided to focus on easy-to-access and easy-to-play browser-based games that would appeal to a broad audience and attract enough unique users to drive an advertising-based business model. T E Network, Inc. became

Pogo.com Pogo.com (stylized as pogo) is a free online game, online gaming website that offers over 50 casual games from brands like Hasbro and PopCap Games. It offers a variety of card games, card and board game, board games to puzzle, sports and word gam ...

, Inc. to pursue this new strategy. TEN advertisement for Duke Nukem Atomic

TEN games

* '' AD&D's Dark Sun Online'' * '' Attack Retrieve Capture (ARC)'' * ''

Big Red Racing ''Big Red Racing'' is a racing video game released for MS-DOS in 1995. It was developed by Big Red Software and published by Domark. Versions were planned for Nintendo 64, PlayStation (console), PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Saturn, 3DO Interactive Mu ...

'' * ''

Blood Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood in the c ...

'' * ''

'' * '' Command & Conquer: Red Alert'' * '' Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands'' * '' Deadlock: Planetary Conquest'' * '' Diablo'' * ''

'' and add-ons * '' EF2000'' * '' Magic: The Gathering Online'' * ''

Master of Orion II ''Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares'' is a 4X turn-based strategy game set in space, designed by Steve Barcia and Ken Burd, and developed by Simtex, who developed its predecessor ''Master of Orion'' and ''Master of Magic''. The IBM PC compat ...

'' * ''

Myth Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...

'' * '' NASCAR Racing Online Series'' * '' Necrodome'' * ''

'' * '' Quake'' * ''

Quake 2 ''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 ...

'' * ''

Shadow Warrior ''Shadow Warrior'' is a series of first-person shooter video games that focuses on the exploits of Lo Wang, a modern ninja warrior who fights through hordes of demons. The original series is made up of one game, '' Shadow Warrior'' (1997), and t ...

'' * ''

Total Annihilation ''Total Annihilation'' is a real-time strategy video game created by Cavedog Entertainment, a sub-division of Humongous Entertainment, and was released on September 26, 1997 by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Two expansion packs ...

'' * ''

Twilight Lands Twilight is light produced by sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere, when the Sun is below the horizon, which illuminates the lower atmosphere and the Earth's surface. The word twilight can also refer to the periods of time when this ill ...

'' * ''

WarCraft ''Warcraft'' is a franchise of video games, novels, and other media created by Blizzard Entertainment. The series is made up of five core games: '' Warcraft: Orcs & Humans'', '' Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness'', '' Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos ...

'' * ''Warheads'' * ''

Wiz-War ''Wiz-War'' is a 4-player board game created by Tom Jolly and first published in 1985 through Jolly’s company, Jolly Games. It is described as a "beer and pretzels game". The board in ''Wiz-War'' is made up of individual segments that form a l ...

'' * '' Wulfram''

Earlier Total Entertainment Network service from Optigon Interactive

The first Total Entertainment Network (TEN) service was an online gaming network and community portal developed by Optigon Interactive. Optigon Interactive was founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden-Reed in 1991 and launched a beta nationally in 1994 via Sprint's X.25 dial-up network."Showdown at the Virtual Corral," San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 5, 1995. Available online at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/1995/01/05/DD7710.DTL The brand was developed in conjunction with Alan Buder, from Colossal Picture, and Michael Lipscomb. It was an online service with a DOS client that offered Chess, Checkers, SimCity, email, and chat The entire executive management team Optigon went on to become the executive management team for TE Network, joined by CTO David King from Outland. In 1996 TEN hosted a first of its kind, nationally participated in "online tournament" rewarding the champions with cash and prizes sparking an immediate surge in online gaming. Some of the first prizes were $500 cash and a lifetime membership to the service. The only Duke tournament was won by one of the first cyber athletes, Christopher S Carpentier, aka "Creamator", who battled over 14 thousand entries to claim the title of “One True Duke!” Most of these newly declared cyber athletes later went on to the PGL "Professional Gamers League" after TEN converted its business model to Pogo. Organizations like the PGL enhanced the awards, and in 1997 Dennis Fong, also known as Thresh, a professional gamer, won John Carmack's Ferrari at the Red Annihilation tournament. During his career as a professional gamer, it is believed that he made over US$100,000 in endorsements alone.

Closure

The Total Entertainment Network was shutdown in October 1999{{Cite web, title=History of the Total Entertainment Network Gaming Service, url=http://www.ten.net/, access-date=2020-11-23, website=www.ten.net due to the rapid development of online gaming services during the time. From the closure, TEN transformed into

and then was acquired by

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the d ...

in 2001. The Total Entertainment Network website in 1997 can still be explored and viewed a
http://ten.net

References

External links

Archived TEN website
as it appeared in 1997 Online video game services Defunct video game companies of the United States Defunct websites Internet properties disestablished in 1999

History

TEN games

Earlier Total Entertainment Network service from Optigon Interactive

Closure

See also

References

External links