Man vs. Machine is world’s largest online FPS with 999 players

When you thought it was cool fragging fellow marines in a deathmatch over at Doom, with Quake expanding the maximum number of players to 16 in a deathmatch, how about upping the ante to three figures? Swedish company MuchDifferent decided to notch their name as part of the effort to create a new world record, having conducted a one-night experiment with a game simply known as Man vs. Machine, where it was specially engineered to allow up to 1,000 simultaneous players log on, but the company missed the magical 1,000 mark by one, as only 999 people logged in.

This is an interesting feat by itself, considering how one needs to have the proper server infrastructure in place so that it can support the tons of folks who are busy trying to carve a niche for themselves in the multiplayer map. I do wonder just how large the particular map must be, since the limited number of respawn points might just lead to unfair frags. This effort was not all peaches and cream though, and although there were very little issues with connectivity for players, the actual gameplay was reportedly unbalanced, resulting in the operations team to perform some major changes during the session itself. Still, up to 2 hours of uninterrupted battle raged on, before the effort by MuchDifferent was stopped. This is a one-off event, so hopefully something similar will happen down the road.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: world record