Total Entertainment Network

Total Entertainment Network (TEN) was an online gaming service that existed from September 1996 until October 1999. of Optigon Interactive and Outland in June 1995 when they received their first round of venture capital funding from Vinod Khosla, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Total Entertainment Network was the first online gaming provider to go live. Operating out of San Francisco, the service offered PC game players a place to play DOS and Windows based games online with and against other players, to chat, to download game related content, and to compete for high scores and to win tournaments. The service was bundled with many PC games and offered as a subscription service. NASCAR Racing Online Series, Quake, Command & Conquer, Panzer General,

Many online games, especially PC games adapted for online game play, require low and consistent latency to play well. It was a major challenge circa 1996 for consumers to find consistent low latency connections to central servers or to other game players because of the latency intrinsic to dial up modems and the heavy congestion at the Internet peering points. T E Network, Inc. partnered with Concentric Network Corporation to offer consumers Internet access dial up numbers that would provide the reliable low latencies they needed to play online games. Concentric optimized their network and their dial up technology for the TEN service. Concentric also received venture capital financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Even with the combined revenues of subscriptions and advertising, TEN remained unprofitable, failing to reach the critical mass numbers of subscribers needed to cover their costs.

The first Total Entertainment Network (TEN) service was an online gaming network and community portal developed by Optigon Interactive. Optigon Interactive was founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden Reed in 1991 and launched a beta nationally in 1994 via Sprint's X.25 dial up network. The brand was developed in conjunction with Alan Buder, from Colossal Picture, and Michael Lipscomb. It was an online service with a DOS client that offered Chess, Checkers, SimCity, email, and chat[1]. The entire executive management team Optigon went on to become the executive management team for TE Network, joined by CTO David King from Outland. In 1996 TEN hosted a first of its kind, nationally participated in "online tournament" rewarding the champions with cash and prizes sparking an immediate surge in online gaming. Some of the first prizes were $500 cash and a lifetime membership to the service. The only Duke tournament was won by one of the first cyber athletes, Christopher S Carpentier, aka "Creamator", who battled over 14 thousand entries to claim the title of “One True Duke!” Most of these newly declared cyber athletes later went on to the PGL "Professional Gamers League" after TEN converted its business model to Pogo. Organizations like the PGL enhanced the awards, and in 1997 Dennis Fong, also known as Thresh, a professional gamer, won John Carmack's Ferrari at the Red Annihilation tournament. During his career as a professional gamer, it is believed that he made over US$100,000 in endorsements alone.

The Total Entertainment Network was shutdown in October 1999 due to the rapid development of online gaming services during the time. From the closure, TEN transformed into Pogo. com and then was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2001. The Total Entertainment Network website in 1997 can still be explored and viewed at http://ten. net.