 The service remained and drew at its peak tens of thousands of concurrent chatters at Excite.When Excite (later merged with @Home to become Excite@Home) crashed at the end of the dot com boom, a group of former Excite employees acquired the rights to use the software and launched vpchat.com.They planned to create a service they built upon the strengths of VP chat – the virtual places web page paradigm, avatars, tours, and games – while addressing the community management problems associated with the unrestricted graphics used in avatars.