Port 1730: Roketz — Reserved for an Amiga game no one plays anymore

What Port 1730 Is

Port 1730 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151) — the section of the port space where applications and services claim a number through IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Registered ports are supposed to be organized. Purposeful. Documented.

Port 1730 is registered to Roketz.

What Roketz Was

Roketz was a multidirectional gravity shooter released in 1995 for the Amiga 1200 and later ported to DOS. You piloted a small spacecraft through caverns, fighting gravity and opponents with thrusters and weapons — gameplay in the tradition of Gravitar and Thrust, two earlier games that made "fighting your own momentum" the entire point.

The game supported local multiplayer. At some point, network multiplayer was planned or implemented, which is why someone filed a port registration with IANA. Port 1730 became Roketz's permanent address on the Internet — officially, on paper, forever.

The game never achieved wide adoption. The network multiplayer, if it shipped at all, saw minimal use. The developers have long since moved on. But the registration remains, because IANA port assignments don't expire.¹

What This Tells You About Registered Ports

The registered port space contains thousands of entries like this — applications from the 1990s and early 2000s that claimed a number optimistically, then faded. Port 1730 is one of the more charming examples: a gravity shooter from the Amiga era with a permanent placeholder in the Internet's phone book.

This is not a failure of the system. It's how the system works. IANA registered ports exist so that applications can have stable, predictable numbers. The cost of that stability is that old registrations persist long after the applications do.²

What's Actually Listening on Port 1730 Today

Almost certainly nothing official. If you see traffic or an open service on port 1730, it isn't Roketz. It's some other application that chose this port informally — or potentially something worth investigating.

To check what's listening on your own system:

Linux / macOS:

ss -tlnp | grep 1730
# or
lsof -i :1730

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :1730

If something shows up, look at the process ID and identify the application. Unassigned-in-practice ports like 1730 are occasionally used by software that didn't bother with formal registration, and occasionally by malware that's exploiting the ambiguity.