Dave Hsieh 3/16/2004 STS 145 BNETD AND BLIZZARD It’s hard to believe sometimes that we went from Pong, a simple table tennis game developed by a single tinkering engineer, to games like Everquest or Grand Theft Auto 3, games developed for years by 50 people at established companies. The game industry has come a long way, and in that journey legitimate business models have been developed. This is no longer some two-bit operation – billions of dollars in revenue are made each year. There are fewer and fewer “independent” game companies; most have been swallowed by a large multi-national parent corporation. It’s no surprise, then, that these corporations would want to do everything they can to protect the legitimacy of their product, much like any other business. The main issue in this industry is piracy. Over the years, as games and computer infrastructures have developed, this problem has become less of an issue in some ways. Now that people need licensed copies of the games to play online, the need to have a real copy of the game has increased. For example, in order to play Starcraft online, you needed the real thing to connect to the Blizzard service battle.net. However, soon after Starcraft was released, a program called bnetd was released. Bnetd was an imitation of the battle.net service, allowing players to choose an alternative service when playing the games online. The ensuing legal battle and uproar in the community caused by bnetd crystallized the industry’s stance on program interoperability and set a precedent for future open source emulation projects.Before we look into the bnetd fiasco, it’s important that we understand the development of Blizzard and its online service, battle.net. Blizzard, a current division of Vivendi Universal Games, had its first big success with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Released in 1994,5 it was arguably the most influential game in a then-upcoming genre known as real time strategy (RTS). Warcraft II 6 was released a year later, and allowed up to eight people to play simultaneously on a LAN or using a protocol known as IPX. Internet play was not yet available, because the Internet uses a different protocol (TCP/IP). However, a freelance service known as Kali was soon available that basically fooled the game into thinking it was on a LAN when it was actually on the Internet. Kali became so popular that Blizzard released a patch to help Kali play, although no formal agreements between the two companies were ever made. The Kali shareware client was eventually bundled with the Warcraft II: Battle Chest edition, even though Blizzard never asked Kali if such an inclusion was acceptable. This was legally safe since shareware by nature can be freely distributed. With the surprise success of the Kali network, Blizzard decided to introduce battle.net with its next product, Diablo. Like Kali, battle.net was a place that players of the game could meet, talk, and play together. Battle.net was a free service which any player who had bought the game could use. This release was such a success that battle.net has become an integral part of every subsequent Blizzard title. How does battle.net actually work? The protocol is actually much simpler than one might think. Battle.net doesn’t actually host games itself – it simply provides a forum for players to meet and set up their own games.8 The actual game is hosted on oneof the players’ own computers. It is therefore not creating games itself, but rather facilitating the opportunity for players to create their own games. In February of 1998, Starcraft was released.4 Starcraft is considered by many to be the best real time strategy game ever released, and is even responsible for revitalizing the Korean economy. A few months after it was released, a student at UC San Diego, Mark Baysinger, began reverse engineering the protocol which Starcraft clients use when connecting to battle.net. He was extremely dissatisfied with his experience of playing the game on Battle.net, and wanted to design his own system. He released the first ever version of a battle.net emulator, which he dubbed Starhack. It was so rudimentary, however, that while players could chat with each other, they could not actually play the game. One day after he posted his emulator, Mark Baysinger was slapped with a cease and desist letter from Blizzard. Confused, he asked for clarification on what exactly he was doing wrong, and what copyright he was infringing. His questions were never answered, and when he refused to shut down his project, the issue was apparently dropped. Mark soon abandoned the project for his own reasons, but released the source code so others could continue to work on it. It became the bnetd project, and soon supported most battle.net functionality, meaning most importantly that bnetd users could actually play the game. It effectively became an open-source alternative to Blizzard’s battle.net service.1 Two of the lead developers, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, say that all they wanted to do was “create a place to play best-selling Blizzard games likeStarcraft and Diablo in a friendly online atmosphere free of the technical bugs that plague Battle.net.” 7 Such an assertion is not unfounded. As an avid player of Blizzard games myself, I can attest to what many complain about all over the Internet – that battle.net is often laggy, overloaded, and crash-prone. Its very popularity is, in many ways, its own downfall – the servers simply can’t effectively handle the load of players. In addition to these technical failings, some aspects of the battle.net community quickly became home to hackers, “trolls,” and other people who destroyed the fun of the game for everyone else. In February of 2002, Blizzard began testing its next incarnation in the Warcraft series by shipping out 5,000 copies of the Warcarft III beta to qualified testers. Blizzard wanted player input on the balance and style of the game before the actual game was released. However, wanting a closed sample of the population, only those who were expressly contacted by Blizzard were given access to battle.net – meaning that nobody else was allowed to test for them. This sentiment was met with strong opposition from many in the Warcraft community, who felt that anybody should be entitled to test the game. It wasn’t long, then, before the communications between the
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