Comment by barfoure
7 hours ago
Here’s a few more:
1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.
2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.
3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.
4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.
5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
Battle.net's simple system of just downloading maps you didn't have helped a lot.
I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.
Fun times.