A Million Middlemen: GameRanger Did Good

The day on which Gearbox made some... brave (though I suspect simply poorly-explained) comments about the problems with multiplayer PC gaming in 2010 seems entirely appropriate for long-time networking-easinator GamerRanger to announce it's hit a million users. Huzzah, and stuff! GameRanger does a whole bunch of matchmaking and community stuff, but arguably it's greatest use is sneaking around the oft-bloated, broken or otherwise unforgiving multiplayer systems that some 600 PC games made the mistake of adopting.

It's also handy for games no longer fully supported by their creators/publishers (for instance, apparently over a million games of Age of Empires II get played via GameRanger every month), and for titles that plum don't work at launch - a bunch of people used it to play Demigod online back when official methods were about as much use as a lactating foot. I don't where that analogy came from. I'm sorry.

The full list of games is here - take a look, see if anything inspires you to a resurrection project, then hop onto the RPS forums and arrange a game with your cheery peers.

Kudos to Mr Scott Kevill for running GameRanger since 1999, even if he did spend nine years of that time only supporting boo-hiss stinky Mac-toys. In an age where we're all forever hungry for shiny new things, it's rather pleasing to see such longevity.