Port 1738: GameGen1 — A Registered Ghost

Port 1738 belongs to the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA upon request — any organization can apply, pay no fee, and receive an official registration. IANA records your service name, your name, and your email, then moves on. There is no audit, no renewal, no verification that the service still exists.

Port 1738 is what happens after that process runs its course.

The Official Record

IANA lists port 1738 as assigned to GameGen1, registered by Glen Pearson at GlenP@multigen.com.¹ MultiGen Inc. was a real company — they made 3D real-time modeling software used heavily in flight simulators and early game development, including a Nintendo 64-specific tool called NinGen. Their flagship product, MultiGen Creator, was the standard for visual simulation databases throughout the 1990s.²

In 1998, MultiGen merged with Paradigm Simulation. The combined company, MultiGen-Paradigm, was acquired by Computer Associates in 2000. It eventually became part of Presagis, now a subsidiary of CAE.³

GameGen1, whatever it was, did not survive any of those transitions. The email domain is a dead company. The service has no documentation, no RFC, no active users anyone can find. It exists only as a line in a text file maintained by IANA.

What the Registered Ports Range Means

The registered range (1024–49151) sits between the well-known ports (0–1023), which require root/administrator privileges to bind on most systems, and the ephemeral ports (49152–65535), which the OS hands out temporarily for outgoing connections.

Registered ports require no privileges to bind — any user-level process can claim one. IANA maintains a registry to prevent collisions, but the registry is advisory, not enforced. Nothing stops two applications from both using port 1738. If one of them is running on your machine and the other tries to connect, the OS will route traffic to whoever got there first.

Is Anything Actually Using This Port?

Probably not GameGen1. But something else might be. Unassigned and ghost-registered ports get repurposed all the time — by gaming platforms, peer-to-peer software, corporate applications, or occasionally malware.⁴

To see what's listening on port 1738 on your machine:

macOS / Linux:

# Show what process is listening on port 1738
lsof -i :1738

# Or with netstat
netstat -an | grep 1738

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :1738

If something shows up, the PID in the last column will tell you which process. On macOS/Linux, lsof names the process directly.

Why Ghost Registrations Matter

The registered ports range has tens of thousands of entries. Many of them are like port 1738 — registered by companies or developers who no longer exist, for services that never shipped or long since died. IANA doesn't reclaim them.⁵

This matters because the registry's usefulness depends on its accuracy. When every firewall admin and network engineer looks up a port number to understand what's crossing their network, they're relying on that registry. A ghost registration is noise — it gives the appearance of information without the substance.

Port 1738 isn't dangerous. It's just a reminder that the Internet's infrastructure is maintained by humans, and humans build things, move on, and sometimes forget to turn off the lights.