NetWars

NetWars is an oddity: a space shooter released in 1993 by Novell, a company that made networking software. It was never a commercial title but a live demonstration of what the IPX protocol in NetWare could do. It shipped with the network system itself, which turned it into an institution on nineties office LANs, one that came alive after hours.

Technically it is a first-person 3D shooter drawn with vectors — clean wireframe outlines with no filled surfaces, but smooth even on the office machines of the day. You fly through open space, steer with mouse or keyboard, throttle up and down and shoot. Collecting satellites restores your shields and adjusts the properties of your ship, which gives you a reason to leave the straight line.

The single-player game runs across eight difficulty levels, each asking two things of you: destroy a set number of enemies and keep your own stations intact. Opponents come in four types, from an ordinary pirate up to a commander, differing in speed and in how hard they press you. It is plain, but it works.

The real centre of gravity, though, was the network. Up to five people could meet over IPX and settle who could shoot whom more often. The choice of vector graphics suited that perfectly, since almost no data travelled across the wire and the game stayed responsive on an office LAN. That experience is the part hardest to recreate today.

Taken alone, the solo game is simple and starts repeating after a few runs, and getting used to the ship's momentum in open space takes a while. As history, it is a model example of a game advertising a company's technology. On oldgame.cz, NetWars starts straight in the browser with nothing to install.