Talk:World Opponent Network

message: it seems small and not important to thisNbisbo (talk) 08:25, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: WON 2 needed

message: Is there anything else that can be said about WON? I doubt it. As such, I have removed the . Feel free to dispute. --AdamM 00:24, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Is this a joke, people hated Valve's take-over.  People started WON2, plus WON still exists (for all of Sierra Entertainment's games and Flipside Entertainment's games, not to mention countless petitions to get Valve games back on WON.--24.171.0.229 (talk) 04:27, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: How is it dead if people still play games on it and it still exists?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.171.0.229 (talk) 04:27, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  current WON games? 

message: When I began my recent rewrite of this article, I had plans to at least mention The Sierra Network (TSN) (later called ImagiNation Network) somewhere near the top.  Coming into this, I was under the impression that TSN and SIGS were closely related (if not the same).  The sources I uncovered, however, pointed towards an origin with the prototype game, Stock Market Challenge, and nothing, so far, has pointed towards TSN.  Thus, at present, I can only assume that TSN and SIGS are only related in that they are both built upon a game's LAN capabilities to enable their own tech stacks for "online" play (and that Sierra built both of them).  This makes SIGS no more related to TSN than any other LAN shim such as Kali (software).
While there is some curious overlap in titles between TSN and early SIGS (CyberStorm, Trophy Bass 2, and some Hoyle titles [not Blackjack]), the discovery that SIGS began with Stock Market Challenge and then Blackjack defeats any implied relationship between the two systems.
It is not hard to speculate that Sierra saw the beginnings of internet gaming and sold TSN (a closed network like Compuserve and AOL) to focus on getting an early jump on it.  And, indeed, it looks like SIGS beat Battle.net to the market by just a few weeks.  It's also not hard to speculate that maybe some of the same people at Sierra worked on both TSN and SIGS.  But... as said, that is all speculation... and only worth mentioning here as a caution to avoid going there until proven.
Regardless, The Sierra Network likely deserves its own article at some point (currently, it has only a paragraph under the Sierra Entertainment article).  I'm not likely to write it--I just burnt far too much time on this WON/WON-enabled games list/Silencer/Mind Control Software push.  TSN is also mostly pre-Wayback Machine (archive.org) era, making it a bit less fun to research from a terminal at home (just a bit).  But, if anyone cares, here are a few starting points:
* https://web.archive.org/web/19970415170715/http://www.inngames.com/Games/index.html
* https://archive.org/search?query=%22The+Sierra+Network%22&sin=TXT
* https://archive.org/search?query=%22ImagiNation+Network%22&sin=TXT
...plus the more-than-odd resurrection of a small part of TSN in 2008:
* https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-sierra-network-ii/
juanitogan (talk) 17:39, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Sierra Network and the ImagiNation Network