Some History on PlayNetrek.org

Started playing Netrek around 1993-1994, remember finding Netrek while performing an AltaVista search with my raging 14.4 modem back in the day. From the beginning I was addicted. Playing online and communicating with and against people all over the world. The game was, and still is, incredible and the concept of having an online game that was completely supported and maintained by the community was intriguing. In January 2004 the game was close to dead. Very little traffic on any of the servers. Netrek has a lot of history and myself, along with many others, did not want to see the game die off. The game was lacking an installer as well as a configuration utility to help tweak options and controls. The old method of installing was basically peformed from a zip file, copying and pasting a directory. The configuring was performed by tweaking a text file and was very cryptic for a lot of new players. I added an installer and wrote a configuration utility in VB. The installer and utility were a hit. After about 6 months of advertising and tweaking my site content to help gain visibility with many of the major search engines, PlayNetrek.org started pulling in a steady flow of traffic. That traffic has died down to a trickle but I keep this site going as a reminder of what once was. This game has a lot of history and I'd like to keep this site alive so it isn't forgotten. Hope to see it make a major comeback some day.


Did PlayNetrek.org write the software available on this site?

I wrote the configuration utilities for both the Windows versions listed on this site, both tutorials, the Clue Game Quick Connect application and the Cambot Helper application. These have been bundled with the Windows versions available on this site into a nice installer package making it easy to get the game installed and get started. The Cambot Helper program, Clue Game Quick Connect and tutorial programs are also listed as separate downloads if you don't want to download the entire game. The actual Netrek clients that are available on this site were written by people who play or have played Netrek and volunteer their time to help improve and maintain the game. Netrek XP 2010 was authored and is maintained by Bill Balcerski. He took over the Windows client development portion of Netrek around 2006 and has done a great job. The previous release, version 4.4.0.4, is also a great client and was written by Stas Pirogov. I relisted that version in 12/2006 as Netrek Classic; Packaged it with an updated tutorial and configuration utility and also included a Clue Game Quick Connect application that allows players to connect to clue games without the headache of typing in everything manually.