From university labs to the modern web — the story of the internet's first multiplayer team game.
Kevin Smith at UC Berkeley creates Xtrek, a two-player space combat game for X Window System terminals on Unix workstations. The game lets two players dogfight over a campus network.
Terence Chang and Scott Silvey extend Xtrek into Netrek, adding team play, planet conquest, multiple ship types, and support for 16 simultaneous players. It becomes arguably the first internet team sport.
Netrek becomes a phenomenon on university networks worldwide. At its peak, around 5,000 players compete daily on dozens of servers. Competitive leagues form — the International Netrek League (1992), the European Netrek League, and others. In December 1993, Kevin Kelly writes in Wired magazine that Netrek is "team chess on speed, or playing mind hockey," calling it the first online sports game. The saying among students: "GPA + Netrek rating is a constant."
The Netrek protocol is documented in RFC 1101 discussions and becomes one of the first networked game protocols studied by the internet standards community. The game pioneers concepts still used in multiplayer gaming today.
In the Informatics building at the University of Ulster's Jordanstown campus, students on the Software Engineering BEng programme discover Netrek in the Sun Lab — rows of Sun SPARCstation 5 workstations running Solaris, with their distinctive "pizza box" form factor, networked via NFS and NIS.
These were Sun Microsystems machines at the height of the company's influence. The SPARCstation 5, released in March 1994 with a MicroSPARC-II processor, was the workhorse of university computing — massively outperforming the 486 PCs of the era. Students logged in to Solaris 2.4 or 2.5, navigated OpenWindows (later CDE), and compiled C code with make on a system that was the professional standard for software development.
It was also the perfect Netrek platform. The X Window System ran natively, the network was fast and always-on, and there was nothing stopping a group of BEng students from compiling the COW client and spending long hours between lectures fighting over galactic territory. From 1994 to 1998, the class of '94 waged campaigns across the galaxy from those Sun workstations — memories that would, decades later, inspire NeoNetrek.
Sun Microsystems releases the UltraSPARC processor and unveils Java — transforming both hardware and software. The transition from 32-bit SPARC to 64-bit UltraSPARC marks a generational leap. Meanwhile, Solaris 2.5 becomes the first truly stable Solaris 2.x release, deployed across university labs worldwide. Sun's motto: "The Network Is The Computer" — a philosophy that Netrek, with its client-server architecture and networked play, embodied perfectly.
The server codebase matures with features like short packets (bandwidth optimization), LTD stats (detailed tracking), and INL tournament support. Client ports appear for Windows, Mac, and Java.
Born from the memories of playing Netrek in the Sun Lab at Jordanstown, NeoNetrek brings the classic game to modern browsers via WebSocket and HTML5 Canvas. No downloads needed — just open a URL and play. The original server protocol is preserved, connected through a WebSocket proxy layer, keeping compatibility with the battle-tested C server.
The first NeoNetrek server launches in London — a tribute to the BEng Software Engineering class of '94–'98, who spent many an hour between lectures commanding starships from those SPARCstation 5s. The spirit of the Sun Lab lives on.