Roger Wilco is one of the first
voice-over-IP client programs designed primarily for use with online
multiplayer video game
A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...
s.
Roger Wilco enabled online gamers to talk to one another through a computer
headset or other audio input device instead of typing messages to each other. Within a year of the software's introduction, over 2 million online video gamers were using the application.
''
Roger
Roger is a masculine given name, and a surname. The given name is derived from the Old French personal names ' and '. These names are of Germanic languages">Germanic origin, derived from the elements ', ''χrōþi'' ("fame", "renown", "honour") ...
'' and ''
Wilco'' are
procedure words which, in
radiophone communication, mean "I understood your message and I will comply".
Development and release
Roger Wilco was developed by a US startup company called Resounding Technology. Three of the company's four founders were roommates when they were undergraduate students at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
: Adam Frankl, Tony Lovell, and Henri de Marcellus.
David Lewis, who led marketing and business development, was based in Silicon Valley and was responsible for growing the Roger Wilco community and managed partnerships with video game publishers who bundled Roger Wilco with their games. Plantronics, PNY, and other game peripheral manufacturers also bundled Roger Wilco with their products.
The company began publishing pre-release versions of the software in the autumn of 1998;
the first
general availability release, Roger Wilco Mark I, followed in May 1999.
The company distributed both the client and server as
freeware. The server software, Roger Wilco Base Station, was developed for
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
,
FreeBSD,
Windows 9x
Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a line of discontinued Microsoft Windows operating systems released from 1995 to 2000 and supported until 2006, which were based on the kernel introduced in Windows 95 and modified in succeeding version ...
, and
Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...
.
Development of a client for
Mac OS never progressed beyond the
alpha phase.
David Lewis demonstrated the product's server-less voice capabilities to
Mpath Interactive, a startup company in
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
, who went on to acquire Resounding Technology based on their proprietary peer-to-peer voice technology. The company IPO'd soon after and renamed it to HearMe, Inc.
In December 2000,
GameSpy bought the Roger Wilco
intellectual property
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...
.
In early 2001, they integrated an updated version of the client software into their
game server browser,
GameSpy Arcade. Players could use the Roger Wilco software if they bought a subscription to GameSpy's Game Tools suite.
David Lewis licensed SDK versions of the voice technology to virtually every major game publisher including Activision, EA, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and others. The licensing arrangement with Microsoft enabled the use of the Voice SDK for Microsoft's Xbox and required that all multi-player Xbox game developers included in-game voice chat capabilities. Today, virtually every leading online multiplayer game includes voicechat due to the pioneering efforts by the Resounding team.
GameSpy published the final version of the Roger Wilco client for Windows on July 8, 2003.
That year, a vice president of consumer products at GameSpy Industries told ''
The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...
'' that Roger Wilco had about 5 million users.
See also
*
Comparison of VoIP software
*
Mumble
*
TeamSpeak
*
Ventrilo
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roger Wilco
1999 software
GameSpy
VoIP software
Windows Internet software