You don't shoot up rocks like Asteroids, you're shooting up people from all over the world.   Anybody with an eye and a hand could play this game, the only prioblem is:   very few master it.  It seems easy, all you do is shoot people with your weapons, it's much more than that.  In SubSpace, you may master somebodies movements, and get a few easy kills next time, but you havn't mastered it.  You need to play for a tonne of hours, play all day, all night, all morning, all the time just to learn how others play.  After your years of study, you're ready to apply your skills.

If you've mastered everybodies moves, which is nearly impossible, since there are no computer players, there's no sure way to know which way your enemy is moving.  But if you have come near to the gratifying task of mastering the game, you can apply all your skills you've learned in zones to achieve the greatest score, best win/lose ratio, best average kill, highest bounty (ship strength), or if you're real subtle, the most friends.

SubSpace was free for a few years, from 1995-1997, then in October of 1997, everybody needed to buy the game to continue playing.  Everybody did.  For almost a year later, till early 1998, SubSpace's publisher, Virgen Interactive Entertainment, went out of business. Oh no!  Who's gong to hold the servers!  Fortunatly for SubSpace, it has one of the most envolving communities any game has every had.  It's players have been running the game since the shut down, enforcing new rules, creating new zones to play in, as well as re-building certain parts of the game, all free of charge.

Due to SubSpace's magnitude, it's obvious this game will not die for quite a long time now, let's hope it doesn't indeed.