In the late summer of 1998, the Internet Gaming Zone was taken over and made a part of MSN while being renamed the Microsoft Gaming Zone. At this point, since the "onstage" part of MSN was gone, Spike's World was gone too. There was no way for anyone to play games on the site, Ants included. In October 1998, after several code changes which included modification to images and existing maps, Microsoft premiered "Microsoft Ants" as one of the games available to play on its servers. The game was free and available to play online after a download of integrated software for anyone who wanted to play it. Shortly after Ants was officially on Microsoft servers, Joshua Howard left Microsoft to work elsewhere, and would not become involved in Ants again until returning to MSN Gaming Zone several years later.