I used this and Hamachi for years
Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.
I used hamachi because no one aside from me in my group of friends knew how to port forward, but it didn't work on my network and it took me 4 years to figure out it was because at&t has it's own network on it's dialup modems by default.
They still do that to this day with their fiber modem/routers! I hate it! And even if you do passthrough to have your own up for only your router, your ping is still never below 23ms because there's two stop points in the chain, that and at&t's dns resolution is ass.
Damn internet oligopolies.
For those that didn't use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.
As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.
It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.
I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...
It also made it really easy to join your friends games before everything was on steam.
Xfire had such a good system for overlay. and just so many good features. It was better 10 years ago than Discord is today.
It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.
Why do you think it was better than Discord today? Didn't get to experience Xfire so genuinely curious about it's user experience.
It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.
VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.
It had a built in screen recorder.
Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.
It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.
Hope it makes a comeback.
Hell yeah. Xfire, Counter Strike Source, and Toonami made up the bulk of my childhood. I hardly hear it talked about anymore
The only reason it came up again for me was I noticed it in some old computer files, ha! Used to be my most used application by far.
Did you pronounce it X-fire or Crossfire?
"Ex-fire". "Crossfire" was an AMD thing.
Man I'd forgotten about this.
This and vent were the first things I loaded when gaming (along with frapps).
Unregistered Hypercam 2
This brought back memories I didn't know I had. Gosh I miss those days, I wish I had downloaded all the clips I recorded before it died. I'm sad now.
There are some archives of the service here -
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire
Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I'm not sure if there's a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.
There's quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xfire.com/profile/*
Holy shit. Just found my profile that had stuff there like bio, pc specs and games/hours from when I was 14... I'm nearly 32 now. Wild ...
GameSpy man. Ftw.
The gametime stats in Xfire were my first clue that I maybe needed to get off the PC once in a while and, as the kids say these days, touch grass.
Was still kinda proud of myself though. Albeit a sort of shameful pride.
I had forgotten it until this post.
God that brings back memories. I mainly used it for Halo CE back on Windows XP still in like 09-10. Joined a clan through Xfire that I played with a bunch. Used it a little for Minecraft too! Those days on CE were the best.
Oh yea xfire was the software to have. I streamed myself doing full playthrough of bioshock and remember even getting quite a few viewers. Good times.
Oh god. I must have had 2000 hours logged on jedi academy with xfire. Brings back memories.
Me too, but it was Civ 4 instead of Jedi Academy
Reminds me of the all seeying eye
I remember disliking it. I don't remember why
Yeah I think I ended up trying it an Ventrillo, and I preferred the latter.
This brought back so many memories. Late night DarkOrbit, CS..
My childhood!
This was the best way to game with and chat with friends. I miss those days.
How about even older: HEAT (HEAT.net)? https://web.archive.org/web/19970601031026/http://www.heat.net/
Used to play Duke Nukem 3D there, and I think one of the Quake games. Later games all came with bundled Gamespy and forced the installation on me, hated it so much I gave up playing online back then, and still never got back into it.
Xfire was my bastion with my totally legit copy of Call of Duty 4.
CoD4 was fireee. Dude, CoDJump, Zombie mod, and on top of it all promod to make the game competitive.
Didn't they have custom skins because I remember messing around with that and rocking some cool skins...?
Oh, I remember. Some of the games I played a lot would just crash if I had Xfire running in the background.
Wow this brought back memories of making bank in clan COD tourneys(=USA=). It was too easy back then, now gamers practice 6 hours a day.
I was an mplayer user. They had plenty of quake team fortress servers.
I used this daily, had so many hours logged pre getting everything on steam. Was actually just talking about it not that long ago, was such a big part of my highschool years.
A blast from the past. Totally forgot about it existing until this post.
Remember installing it from my Medal of Honor disk. Was it Pacific Assault? I don’t remember.
I remember it being a thing I didn't use. It was like a voice chat/messenger thing with a built in game browser like GameSpy, right? I used TeamSpeak and some other tool mostly over xFire. I didn't know anyone else who used xFire so it was kinda useless to me. A lot of communication apps in the late 90's/early-mid 2000's had that unfortunate downfall for me. No point in using something nobody I would talk to uses 🤷🏻♂️
I think most people used it to find servers to play on. I know that's what I used it for.
I remember i had an account with my real name on it. I lost the password so my name was forever associated with an Xfire account i created as an edgy 14 year old. I msged support and they were like the most stereotypical americans ever lol "We cant verify if that ID is valid bc you arent from the USA but we will delete it as a curtesy"
Thank god for the GPDR, this interaction would go a bit different today lol
This came up in convo with a co-worker recently. I had completely forgotten about it until he mentioned it and then, suddenly, a flood of memories came rushing back.
Never knew anyone to use this
I dont know what this is
