An interesting convergence in history during that year. Blizzard's Battle.net was released that year in Diablo, GameSpy was formed, and QuakeWorld started. All

An interesting convergence in history during that year. Blizzard's Battle.net was released that year in Diablo, GameSpy was formed, and QuakeWorld started. All are forms of "master server gives list of running game servers", which is pretty central to making it easy to play games on random strangers' servers. Edit: Never mind, apparently that aspect of QuakeWorld was a bundled version of QuakeSpy which evolved into GameSpy.