XPilot
More info
- Creator
- Bjørn Stabell, Ken Ronny Schouten
- Released
- 1991
- Type
- Network game
A multiplayer gravity shooter played over the internet, written at the University of Tromsø and played on workstations around the world.
Bjørn Stabell and Ken Ronny Schouten wrote XPilot in 1991 for the X terminals in Tromsø. You steered a small ship with inertia and gravity through maps full of walls, gun turrets and balls to be hauled home — essentially Thrust with opponents. The server held the game world, clients connected over UDP, and a metaserver listed the games running around the world.
It became a classic time sink in early-1990s computer labs, where powerful workstations and a fixed university connection beat anything a home computer could offer. Alongside Netrek and the MUDs it was one of the first games to assume the internet rather than a local network, and volunteers kept developing it long after its authors had moved on.