Participate Systems was acquired by in November 2004. During the volunteer program's conversion to its new management, all previous token designations were replaced with a single "+" token and a new name, the "Member Plus", or MPlus program. In 2001, Participate Systems won the contract and would continue to lead the program until its official disbanding. Volunteer Moderators for the Zone were initially designated as members of the "Zone Team", or zTeam, with assorted tokens assigned to five different teams: the Gaming Team (!), Helproom Team (+), Tournament Hosting Team (%), zStar Team (*), and Tech Support Team (?).īecause of legal complexities when AOL was sued by their volunteers-and the volunteers won the case-MSN Games reformed their policy by contracting a third-party company to manage the program.
The idea was to have volunteers moderating chat lobbies, hosting tourneys, offering tech support, and interacting with the gamers to collect general feedback. MSN's competition with AOL Games resulted in the creation of a Volunteer Program for the Zone, which AOL also offered. Formerly, the site competed with other similar free-game sites, such as Yahoo! Games and. The Zone's first competitors were AOL's, as well (and its successor Gamespy), and Sega's. Windows XP and ME games were shut down on July 31, 2019, while the remaining games on Windows 7 were shut down on Janu(a little over a week after Microsoft ceased support for Windows 7). Microsoft announced in July 2019 that it would be shutting down the Internet series of games built into Windows operating systems. This lasted until the closure of MSN Groups in 2009. The website also featured a community forum which was set-up in 2006. It started with a handful of card and board games like Hearts, Spades, Checkers, Backgammon, and Bridge.įor the following 5 years, the Internet Gaming Zone would be renamed several times and would increase in popularity with the introduction of popular retail- and MMORPG-games, such as MechWarrior, Rainbow Six, UltraCorps, Age of Empires, Asheron's Call and Fighter Ace.
The site was rebranded to "Internet Gaming Zone" and launched in 1996. In 1996, Steve Murch, a then-employee of Microsoft, convinced Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to acquire the small online game site, then owned by Electric Gravity. The first version of the site, which was then called "The Village", was founded by Kevin Binkley, Ted Griggs, and Hoon Im.
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