MegaWars III was a massively multiplayer empire building game written by Kesmai and run continuously on CompuServe between 1984 and 1999. It was one of CompuServe's most popular games throughout its lifetime with thousands of players joining the month-long game cycles. It was only shut down after CIS was purchased by AOL and moved to the web-based "CompuServe 2000" interface that would not cleanly support it. A modified version, Stellar Emperor ran for much of the same time period on GEnie, also ending in 1999 when that service was shut down by General Electric. A new version of Stellar Emperor, sporting a new client-server GUI, was run for a short period on Kesmai's GameStorm.