WON

From OPU Wiki

World Opponent Network or WON was an online gaming service, created by Sierra Games as the Sierra Internet Gaming System (SIGS). WON was used by games such as Outpost 2, Half-Life, Star Trek: Armada, Soldier of Fortune and online versions of casino games.

Sierra was purchased by Havas in January 1999 and Cendant Software became Havas Interactive, which came to control WON. In March 2000, Havas Interactive merged WON.net with Prize Central Net to form Flipside.com. Regardless, games such as Valve Software's Half-Life continued to use the service.

In 2001, Valve aquired WON from Flipside.com and began to implement the Steam system in beta form. Over the next few years, as Steam was developed and tested, WON continued to serve.

Valve shutdown the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004, officially killing the remnants of WON. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system. The announcement disappointed some of the long-time Half-Life and Counter-Strike players who held it in high esteem for being, in their view, more efficient in terms of speed than Steam.

After the shutdown of WON, some players continue to run a patched version of the retail versions of Half-Life or Counter-Strike, which connects to a WON replacement called No-WON (or WON2), and allows users to use the original server browser to connect to Half-Life servers, and their various mods (including Counter-Strike 1.5, and a Steamless version of 1.6), just as they would before WON's shutdown.

WON also had its fair share of problems. Some found themselves permanently banned for no apparent reason. WON also caused some connection issues in relation to servers.