The original MS-DOS version of Kali was created by Scott Coleman, Alex Markovich and Jay Cotton in the spring of 1995.
It was the successor to a program called iDOOM (later Frag) that Cotton wrote so he could play id Software's DOS game DOOM over the Internet.
Kali95 took advantage of the greater network support of Windows 95, allowing Kali to achieve mainstream popularity.
[3] In the mid-1990s, it was an extremely popular way to play Command & Conquer, Descent, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Duke Nukem 3D, and other games over the Internet, with more than 50,000 users worldwide by the end of 1996.
[4] Since it was the only way for Windows and DOS users to play Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness against people outside of a LAN or dial-up connection, Blizzard actually included a copy of the program on the CD, going so far as to also provide a customized executable (WAR2KALI.EXE) which optimized the game's network code to account for Internet latency and also allowed users to specify their own settings for packet transmission and handling.
During the height of IPX emulation's popularity, a competing product called "Kahn" was being sold by the now-defunct developer Stargate Networks for $15[5] ($5 cheaper than Kali at that time).
The minor cost savings proved largely ineffective against Kali, and Kahn never achieved much market share.
As IPX itself was phased out, Kali's unique emulation technology fell by the wayside and the software shifted its emphasis to becoming a game browser, a market where strong competitors such as GameSpy were already established.