The Inner Circle
Daniel Goldman wrote and operated a BBS that fostered community online, with a simple friend graph, hackers, and everything you would expect in the 1980s.
Founding account F0101 / Origins
Before it was a lobby,
it was a place.
Before Kleiner Perkins and acquisitions, there was a dream of online community and games made real by a dedicated team, funded by game royalties, in a small office in Emeryville, California.
A shared design question
Goldman and Linden-Reed start collaborating on a mythology and folklore-based MMO dubbed “Epic.” It needs the technology and framing to support it. That becomes Optigon Interactive and Total Entertainment Network.
Founding account F02A public national beta
Optigon publicly presented TEN and distributed the beta over Sprint’s national X.25 dial-up network.
1994 press and product record“TEN is designed for a progressive audience… The services are designed to promote creativity, customization, interaction and play.”
Optigon, Facts and Features, 1994
The 1994 product definition is explicit: a graphical interface; email and newsgroups; chat, files, and news wires; portraits and profiles; paths and macros; multiplayer games; information tools; and user-created graphical environments. SimCity, WizWar, chess, backgammon, and Go were activities inside the community, not the limit of it.
The founders were Daniel Goldman, president and technical/product leader, and Janice Linden-Reed, design director responsible for interface design, art direction, game design, and management. A period profile says their collaboration began in 1986 and that Linden-Reed moved full-time onto the service in 1992. Profile
The system drew on Optigon’s work with Maxis from 1988 through 1993, then moved from proprietary dial-up infrastructure toward the commercial Internet without abandoning its community thesis. The service called TEN was already public before Outland entered the story. Its early game progression ran from multiplayer SimCity in 1994 to WizWar, Descent, and most two-player games in 1995, then to the much more demanding Quake integration in 1996.
The original ambition
Participation was the product.
- Graphical identity and profiles
- Chat, email, news, and files
- User-built graphical environments
- Social play from chess to SimCity
- Editorial and software distribution
The 1995 shift
Hardcore games became the headline.
- Low-latency Internet play
- Duke Nukem 3D and Quake
- Exclusive publisher relationships
- Rankings, tournaments, and the PGL
- A narrower public identity
The return to community
Community becomes the product again.
- Familiar, slower-paced games
- Card, board, puzzle, and social play
- Chat and persistent player identity
- A broader, community-centered audience
- Pogo continues under Electronic Arts