The first multiplayer LAN game ever available to the general public

Within the eXoDOS collection lies a historically significant game that most people today have never heard anything about: Snipes. On its surface, this game seems simple, but it created the foundation of the LAN party.

This was a game I played many times as a child without ever knowing its significance. I'd like to share a little bit of what I've learned.

If you step back in time to the 1970s, multiplayer games had already existed for a while. However, nearly every one of these games either connected two computers together directly through a serial cable or modem, or they connected client machines to a time-share system that was powered by a single mainframe computer. People would generally connect to the games through dummy terminals, bulletin board systems, or ARPANET. A LAN game works differently. It involves multiple computers communicating game data through a network while running the games independently.

There were only three LAN game releases ever created before Snipes.

In 1975, the first LAN game ever created, a port of Maze War, was developed at MIT to make use of an on-campus LAN with its own protocol, Chaosnet. The university had developed Chaosnet that same year to network together the mainframes and minicomputers on its campus. This, however, did not involve personal computers.

The other two were developed for the Xerox Alto. Before the IBM PC, the Xerox Alto was the only personal computer to have ever been developed with LAN capabilities. 2000 units of the computer were produced, none of which were ever sold to the public. These were almost all internally used by Xerox, although a few hundred of them were donated to the government and a handful of universities. For this reason, only two LAN games ever got created for the Xerox Alto before LAN games had alrady become a thing on the IBM PC. This included a 1977 port of Maze War, developed at Xerox PARC, and a 1978 game called Alto Trek, developed at the University of Rochester.

In 1981, Novell contracted SuperSet Software to create some networking software. The network system they began developing was called Sharenet. Snipes was showcased in Houston, Texas, at the June 1982 National Computer Conference to advertise its capabilities. Shortly after the showcase, Novell formally hired everyone from SuperSet Software to develop the network software into Novell NetWare. For the next decade, until 1993, Snipes got bundled with every copy of Novell NetWare. This resulted in it being on thousands of computers for well over a decade.

Snipes was one of the first games I ever played as a kid for that reason. However, there is nothing in Snipes that indicates it is a multiplayer game. I went most of my life having no idea it wasn't just a single player game. Even eXoDOS 6.04 lists it as single player only. It doesn't help that SuperSet Software sold a single player only version of the game at ComputerLand stores in 1982. This is a game of great historic importance that is easily overlooked. When I found out it was fourth LAN game ever created and the first one ever made for a commercially sold personal computer, my mind melted.