Slashdot had a post today about a patent made for Yahoo! Messenger. The patent, titled Game server for use in connection with a messenger server (Warning: don't read if you want to claim ignorance), deals with using a messaging client to connect someone to a game server. Looking over it, I am left wondering if this was not done in ICQ already. I remember ICQ being able to have a menu item to launch Quake which probably used the same or similiar method described in Yahoo!'s patent.

So did ICQ have prior art on this or not?