Activision had a delightful surprise after opening up its server a couple of weeks ago to begin accepting beta testers for its upcoming title Dark Reign. After only four days of service, the company's download site, http://www.activision.com/darkreign/, had logged approximately 300,000 hits! This overwhelming response resulted in the entire Activision server crashing, preventing many hungry wanna-be beta testers from getting their registrations in.

As announced earlier at PCGames.com, Activision was offering the first 100 people to sign up for the beta test a limited-edition autographed poster from the Dark Reign production team. Any guesses how long that took? 1 hour? 30 minutes? 10 minutes? Try 60 seconds!! That's right, cap'n. Activision began the process on Friday, March 21, at 5:00 p.m. and at 5:01, 100 beta-tester hopefuls entered in their information. Forty-four minutes later, the server crashed because of the high volume of traffic congesting Activision's lines. This was the first of many server crashes that occurred during the sign-up process, which lasted until April 7 because of the traffic.

Activision now has the task of selecting a few hundred beta testers from the thousands that met all the requirements. There will be two separate waves of beta testing, and selected users will be notified via e-mail by Tuesday, April 15. These testers will then have the job of critiquing gameplay, compatibility, multiplayer capabilities, and how fun the game is overall. Tough job, but some poor sap has got to do it!

--Joe McCloud