Back, oh, roughly 10 years ago, the story goes, Sierra founder Ken Williams wanted a place for his mother to play Bridge with her friends. So he set out to develop an online method for doing this. Sometime later, The Sierra Network had become a full featured proprietary multiplayer online game system.

There were card parlors where you could play Spades, Hearts, Euchre and a number of other card games. There was a casino area for Blackjack, Poker and even slot machines. You could play NTN Trivia (the same trivia game as in bars around the U.S.). It had an internal email system for sending and receiving mail from other players. There were roleplaying dungeons, ace fighting airplanes and even golf and minigolf. And the Bridge parlor ended up being the venue for practice games among world champion tournament Bridge players.

It was all under one roof and you could just zone hop according to your mood.

The graphics rivaled, and mostly bested, any of today's online card games offered on sites such as Yahoo. The dungeon games were crude by any of today's standards but back then, they were good graphical MUDs with excellent music and pretty good storylines.

Somewhere in the mid-90s, other companies such as TEN (do NOT try to go to that Website, trust me on this) tried to build competitors, but no one really did.

The proprietary dial-up eventually became a problem as the phone companies began to charge as much as $2 an hour per player to Sierra, so the amount Sierra had to charge became unaffordable, especially as the Web took hold and either free, or $10 a month unlimited gaming became common. Eventually, The Sierra Network, (later called The ImagiNation Network), was no more.

What amazes me is that no one has repeated its success on the Web.

Yahoo has games, but it's mostly card games. The closest I see is Microsoft has MSN Gaming Zone (no surprise, rumor has it Mr. Gates used to play on Sierra), and although MSN Gaming Zone has a lot of games of different varieties, HTML interfaces remove the sense of entering another universe that was so much the appeal of Sierra.

Since The Sierra Network was in all aspects a success before the pricing became an issue, why hasn't another company, or even Sierra, recreated it on the Web? Maybe you can explain it to me on our online forum.