for £5.5 million in 2000, but following the sale, the service began to make losses and in August 2001 it was reduced to a shell company and was looking to sell off Wireplay.

Wireplay was built in to various PC games to allow players to engage in multiplayer online play via a closed dial-up network/service.

[1] A lag of 105 milliseconds was achieved assuming players met the minimum requirements of a BT landline, a PC with an Intel Pentium 486 processor and a 9600bit/s modem.

The notice board was essentially a manual matchmaking hub where players could post or accept "game offers".

[3] BT publicly announced Wireplay at the Live 95 Consumer Electronics at Earl's Court in London in September 1995 where visitors were able to test out a prototype of the service.

18 months later, the service was also launched in the US and Australia, with BT licensing the technology to telephony companies in those countries.

[1] In 1997, Wireplay-ready Internet cafés were opened inside a number of Blockbuster Video stores across the UK to enable those without access to the service from home to be able to play.

[9][10] Chess along with backgammon and bridge were introduced to Wireplay as part of BT's "Play Games Now" service.

[13] As part of this, they made the 5 lead server administrators redundant, however those staff continued to support the service unpaid.

[1] By June 1998, there were 68 compatible games including Doom, Age of Empires, Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 and Warcraft II.