World Opponent Network

World Opponent Network or WON was an online gaming service, created by Sierra Games as the Sierra Internet Gaming System (SIGS). WON was used by games such as "Homeworld", "Half-Life", "", "Soldier of Fortune", "Dark Reign 2", "Silencer", "ARC" and online versions of casino games.

Sierra was purchased by Havas in January 1999 and Cendant Software became Havas Interactive, which came to control WON. In March 2000, Havas Interactive merged WON.net with Prize Central Net to form Flipside.com. Regardless, games such as Valve Software's "Half-Life" continued to use the service.

In 2001, Valve acquired WON from Flipside.com and began to implement the Steam system in beta form. Over the next few years, as Steam was developed and tested, WON continued to serve.

Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004, officially killing the remnants of WON. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system. The announcement disappointed some of the long-time "Half-Life" and "Counter-Strike" players who held it in high esteem for being, in their view, more efficient in terms of speed and system resources than Steam.

After the shutdown of WON, some players continued to run a patched version of the retail versions of "Half-Life" or "Counter-Strike", which connects to a WON replacement called No-WON (or WON2), and allows users to use the original server browser to connect to "Half-Life" servers, and their various mods (including "Counter-Strike" 1.5, and a Steamless version of 1.6), much as they could before WON's shutdown.

Since its shutdown, users who try to connect to WON in games such as the retail version of Half-Life will receive an error message.

External links

* [http://www.won.net/ WON.net] - old WON site
* [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=954400004%40p5.f5.n5010.z2.ftn&output=gplain Usenet post that reports the WON/Prize Central merger]
* [http://www.steamlessproject.nl/ Non steam "Counter-Strike" Project Site]
* [http://www.steamlessproject.nl/won2/servernetwork.php Won2 Server Network]
* [http://www.zvdk.nl/1.5/rightnow.php list of WON2 servers online now]
* [http://www.forumplanet.com/planethalflife/topic.asp?fid=2968&tid=1434380 #wonfuneral post at Planet Half-Life]
* http://www.arsia-mons.com Silencer Community - The game has be rereleased with private servers.