What This Port Is
Port 3596 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151), the middle band of the 65,535-port address space. IANA maintains this range for services that have formally requested a dedicated port number. Unlike the well-known ports (0–1023), registered ports don't require root privileges to bind, and they carry no inherent trust.
Port 3596 has an official IANA registration: iw-mmogame, short for "Illusion Wireless MMOG," assigned in September 2002 to a contact at Illusion Softworks on both TCP and UDP.1
The service never launched.
The Story Behind It
September 2002 was a specific moment in gaming history. EverQuest had proven that millions of people would pay monthly to inhabit a virtual world. Ultima Online was five years old and still growing. World of Warcraft was two years away from redefining everything. Every studio with ambition had an MMORPG on the whiteboard.
Illusion Softworks was a Czech studio that had just shipped the original Mafia — a critically acclaimed open-world crime game set in 1930s America. Ambitious, technically sophisticated, and clearly thinking about what came next. Someone there registered port 3596 with IANA for "Illusion Wireless MMOG." The "Wireless" in the name suggests this may have been aimed at early mobile platforms, which were just beginning to be taken seriously as gaming devices in 2002.
The MMOG never materialized. Illusion Softworks was eventually acquired and became 2K Czech. The port registration remains in the IANA database as the only surviving evidence that the project existed at all.
What You'll Find on Port 3596 Today
Nothing official. No protocol specification was ever published, no client software was ever released. If you find port 3596 open on a machine, it's either:
- An ephemeral port assigned by the OS for an outbound connection — operating systems pull from the registered range when they need temporary ports
- A custom application that picked this number arbitrarily
- A misconfigured or malicious service that chose an obscure port to avoid detection
There is no legitimate "iw-mmogame" traffic in the wild.
How to Check What's Listening
If port 3596 shows up in a scan or audit, check what's actually bound to it:
On Linux/macOS:
On Windows:
The output will show you the process ID. From there, identify the process and decide whether it belongs.
Why Abandoned Registrations Matter
The IANA registry has thousands of entries like this one — ports registered in hopeful moments that never became real services. They're not a problem, exactly, but they create confusion. A security scanner will flag port 3596 as "iw-mmogame" and an analyst might take that at face value, assuming some known game service is running when the port has no practical meaning at all.
Unassigned and abandoned ports are a reminder that the registry is a record of intentions, not reality. What's actually running on a port is always more authoritative than what the registry says should be running on it.
Related Ranges
- Port 3594–3595: Unassigned
- Port 3597: Unassigned
- Port 3724: World of Warcraft — the MMORPG that launched the same year and actually shipped 2
Frequently Asked Questions
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