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Games Entertainment

Timeline of Online Gaming 179

Posted by michael from the tradewars-will-never-die dept.
Jippy_ writes "While reminiscing about an old online game I used to play called "Shadows of Yserbius", I found a very neat timeline of online gaming. It goes back as far as PLATO and is current up to this year. It's not news, but it's good to read and remember the days of pre-EverCrack online games." GEnie, wow.
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Timeline of Online Gaming More

Timeline of Online Gaming

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  • The Old Days of MUDing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Salis ( 52373 ) on Saturday August 24, 2002 @11:05PM (#4135153) Journal
    I remember playing a DIKU MUD named Sojourn back in '93-'94. Incidentally, the lead designer of EverQuest, Brad McQuaid (sp?), played the same MUD. EverQuest is basically Sojourn with graphics, heh. Maybe that's why it got so boring so quick?

    For the next generation of MMORPGs...look at MUSH-like games, where the players have greater and greater ability to alter their environment and create new sub-environments and sub-games within the game itself.

    Salis
    • I played a DIKU MUD called "Sanctuary" (named Tysth), and it absolutely rocked. I was a member of the Dragon guild, sworn enemies of the Foresaken. Of course there was one prick on their side, clearly heavily propped up by his guild, who would not fail to portal to me whenever I left the safe zone and kill me, despite being about two levels below me. I'd say that that was the day that I gave up MUDding.
    • Ah, the good ole days of Sojourn. Just don't tick off Mystara and her henchmen ;P But then again, that was part of the fun I think ;)
    • Ahh sojourn, wasted many months/years playing that....and yes that was true. EQ was basically a Sojourn ripoff with 3d graphics. BTW who where you?

    • The first time I played EQ I said 'this is sojourn' and quit a month later. Both Sojourn and EQ were/are major timewasters. Someone once described EQ as 'lots of nothing to run through' and I have to agree.

      After my err, sojourn at sojourn I went back to Sneezy/Grimhaven which is just as modified as sojourn and has much better gameplay. Its still running today.

  • Alan Cox did this too? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Saturday August 24, 2002 @11:05PM (#4135154)
    > 1987
    > AberMUDs are released by Alan Cox.

    OMG.

    Is he responsible for EQ as well as Linux?

    Has there ever been a man who took more hours out of our lives?
    • "Has there ever been a man who took more hours out of our lives?"

      Well, lets see, Reboots X 3minutes = 2 years of my life wasted rebooting windows, so yes, and his name was Bill Gates
    • If you want to talk inspirationally, yeah, I'd say he's partially reqsponsible for Evercrack, AO, and all the other MMORPGs that have emerged from the MUD world.

      *heh* Gotta love 'm.
  • It nice to see Tradwars on it. Haven't seen that and years.

    Here is a Mirror [216.239.53.100]
  • BBS Door games are where its at dammit! I must've burned my whole 60 minute quota for the day on Legend Of the Red Dragon for months. never saw a dragon either, I was having too much fun breaking into people's hotel rooms and killing them while they were logged off.
    • Here's A Quote from a FAQ on the game:

      "Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD) has been a mainstay of regular BBSs for many years now and is still one of the more popular doors on Telnet BBSs.

      Ok, that out of the way, it's time to to start talking about L.O.R.D. LORD is a BBS Door game with a medievel Role Playing Game theme. You probably knew that already. The usual goal behind playing LORD is to reach level 12 and kill the red dragon. Once you've killed the dragon you can go back and do it all over again or hang out at lower levels and really frustrate people! More on that later.

      You advance levels by gaining experience points and then challenging your "master" to a fight (and winning). You can gain experience points by fighting monsters and other players, both online and offline, killing other players in self defense, and through various other methods. Once you get to level 12 you can Search for the red dragon and try to kill him, good luck!

      Along the way to level 12 you'll be able to earn gold to buy better weapons and armor, meet and rescue fair maidens, speak with monsters both friendly and otherwise and find gems. Though the goal of LORD may be simple enough, there are lots of surprises that can pop up and there are a number of hidden keys on the various menus.

      Now that I've given you a basic overview of LORD, the rest of this document will be organized by menus. As I get to the various menus I'll first list the menu including hidden keys, and then explain the functions in more detail. After this you'll find a "misc" section which contains material that doesn't fit in elsewhere. Because of the menu based organization of this FAQ, if you read it from beginning to end some things may not make sense at first but will become clear when some details are explained later.

      Copyright (C) 1998 by John Alan Elson."
    • That dragon was nasty.

      I preferred bedding Lily(think that was her name)
    • best. game. EVER. By far. I used to spend so much time on that game it was sick. Killing sleeping people was too much fun.

  • important relevant gaming article (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Lets talk about Jon Carmack. Jon is the legendary programmer of such classic PC games as Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke nukem 3d, Quake 1, 2, and 3, unreal, and the upcoming doom3. Jon has single handedly created the genre known as the first-person-shooter. He has also popularized the Direct3d 3d format over Microsoft's competing Opengl format, as well as caused public interest in 3d cards when he first released accelerated quake for the s3 virge chipset. Jon carmack has redefined gaming on PC's.

    Now stop for a moment and think... What would have happened if Albert Einstein had worked creating amazing pinball games instead of creating the theory of relativity? Humanity would suffer! Jon carmack is unfortunately doing JUST THIS, using his gifts at computer coding to create games instead of furthering the knowledge of humanity. Carmack could have been working for NASA or the US military, but instead he simply sits around coding violent computer games.

    Is this a waste of a special and rare talent? Sadly, the answer is yes.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Not only is Jon carmack not contributing to society, he is causing it's downfall. What was the main reason for the mass murder of dozens of people in columbine? Doom. It's always the same story... Troubled youth plays doom or quake, he arms himself to the teeth, he kills his classmates. This has happened hundreds of times in the US alone. Carmack is not only wasting his talents and intelligence; he is single-handedly causing the deaths of many young men and women. How does he sleep at night?

    Carmack is a classic example of a very talented and intelligent human being that is bent on total world destruction. Incredibly, he has made millions of dollars getting people hooked on psychotic games where they compete on the internet to see who can dismember the most people. I believe there is something morally wrong when millions of people have computerized murder fantasies, and we have Jon Carmack to thank. Carmack has used his superior intellect to create mayhem in society. Many people play games such as quake so much that their minds are permanently warped. A cousin of mine has been in therapy for 6 months after he lost a 'death match' and became catatonic.

    It is unfortunate that most people do not realize how much this man has damaged all the things we have worked hard for in America. Jon has wasted his intelligence, caused the deaths of innocent children, and warped this country forever. To top it off, he got rich in the process and is revered by millions of computer users worldwide. Perhaps one day the US government will see the light and confine Jon Carmack somewhere with no computers so he can no longer use his intelligence to wreak havoc on society.

    • I have no doubt that John is a very talented individual, but at the same time one has to wonder if, at least partially, his extreme expertise is the result of a luxury that very few of us have: The ability to focus singularily on one specific aspect of gameplay (the graphics engine) for years and years on end. John is in the very rare position of still doing the same thing, pretty much, that he was doing years ago, yet no one is berating him or pushing him to climb the corporate ladder, etc, and every day he gets a little more clever, and adds another couple of tricks to his grab bag.
    • I'm pretty sure Direct3D is a product of Microsoft and not OpenGL. That's why you have DirectX, Direct3D, and DirectSound...all on the MS home site. Carmack just uses whatever is best..and he's looking particularly at OpenGL 2.0 for its good performance in many aspects.

      I wouldn't blame the world's destruction on a middle-aged computer graphics programmer.

      I think people who do research on increasing maximum nuclear weapons yields deserve much more credit. Then again, there are also people who purposely buy up patents for clean technologies in order that they not be further researched and made into applications. Then again, there's tyrants and dictators who purposely starve their people in order to buy old russian tanks and rifles. There's also arms dealers, drug smugglers, coca farmers, poppy harvesters, and a million other TYPES of people who do more harm than middle-aged computer graphics programmers.

      Or maybe you're one of the dozen teenagers who can't separate reality from fantasy and think playing violent video games _actually_ makes you violent in reality. If that's the case, then I just pity you.

      Sorry, John, you're not responsible for the world's end. Though it would make a great resume builder.
      • The obvious troll changed the details of just about everything (crediting several games to Carmack that he didn't make, the GL/DX3D mixup, etc).

        But! What was the first 3D card Quake supported? Hint: It wasn't the Voodoo, with GLQuake.
    • Argh, I wish I still had mod privileges. This is the second time I've seen this post--at +5 at that. It was funny the first time, now it's just karma whoring.

    • Re:important relevant gaming article (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, Carmack works for his own company designing rockets. http://www.armadilloaerospace.com
    • Awesome troll :) Should have got a +5 troll :)
  • someone please host this... it's server is slo(more o's here)w.

    also, where is PSO, i mean... the dc gets no love?
  • Was anybody here in a Yserbius clan called TnT?

    Just curious.

  • annoyingly fantasy and PC-centric as usual (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gizzmonic ( 412910 ) on Saturday August 24, 2002 @11:18PM (#4135198) Homepage Journal
    A pity they mention J.R.R. Tolkien (peripherally important at best)and stuff like "Hacking into Computer systems," but there's no mention of the first cable modem game of all, the SEGA channel!

    It's funny how someone can slap together a timeline of their own personal preferences, (obviously without doing any research) and call it the History of Online Gaming. This is almost as bad as that Tom's Hardware Article that said "DOOM is a watershed in console gaming," along with a milquetoast collection of benchmarks that had nothing to do with gameplay or innovation. Someone should double-check this stuff before they post it.

  • They missed quite a few games. :( (Score:3, Informative)

    by MsWillow ( 17812 ) on Saturday August 24, 2002 @11:23PM (#4135209) Homepage Journal
    While I was in high school (1974-1978), we used various HP minicomputers, timeshared. Along about '76-ish, there was a multi-person chat program called TALK, using the HP2000 Access's PFA / MWA (program/file access and multiple write access) to communicate between users via a file.

    Not long after that, Ray Zeubler, a music student at WRHarper Junior College, started writing KINGDOM, a multi-user DnD-ish game. It was rather popular, and accounted for many boxes of paper on those old DECWriters and ASR-33s :) I wrote a cheesy knockoff, called SPACE, on my Schaumburg High account, S-350.

    Out of high school, I eventually ended up working as a terminal aide at Harper. Ray graduated, and Kingdom went away, so I took Space, and re-vamped it into a Kingdom clone, running from my new T-920 account. This time, though, we used up barrels of electrons, playing it on faster CRTs :)

    Somewhere along in here, Steve Woolfson wrote a version of Empire for the HP, but it never seemed to catch on like the Plato version did.

    Eventually, I left Harper, for a career as a software engineer. Far as I know, Space, Kingdom (both Ray's and mine), Empire, Talk, all of those died. All were rather fun, and all wasted great piles of CPU time and disk space :) They actually also helped get many people into computers, well before they were commonplace items. Heck, as I told Matk Benson, my best HS buddy, when his brother Pat enrolled in a programming class, "Geez, will you look at that! Now every idiot and his brother are getting into computers!" *GRIN*
  • From the article: Sometime prior to 1984, John Sherrick writes Tradewars. It's similar to Star Traders, written in BASIC, and is for BBSes.

    .... which was immediately followed up a few hours later with dozens of TradeWars helper programs.

    =-Jippy
  • The real question is: when will professional gaming take off? You can do so much with the idea, make everything so much more interesting than basic professional sporting events, and with webcasting (a la Quakecon tourney) being so cheap and trivial to implement, it is really amazing that it hasn't taken off. I mean, hell, people pay to watch GOLF on television; why not Quake?

    When it does happen (and I am sure it will) I wonder if it will go the direction of pro baseball, with big corporations buying franchises and selling tickets to imax style theaters, or pro bowling, with people who are extremely highly skilled going to big tournamounts and competing for cash, or maybe some completely new paradigm? So far it looks like it is headed the bowling/golf direction, but there is only one real data point (quakecon) and there have not been any true competitions for teamplay- oriented games yet...

    blatant Q3A tourney plug [dayentech.com]
    • > The real question is: when will professional gaming take off?

      It's professional when you can make big money doing it. It has taken off, and in a big way. It's called Online Gambling. Thousands (millions?) of people log on to the internet, play against each other or against a computer, for real money.

      Granted, not much gaming online creates big celebreties.
    • It's taken off already, just not with FPS games. Many Starcraft: Brood War games are shown on television in eastern asia (mostly korea) every day. Gaming is considered a sport there, and people make their livings off of it just like people do with baseball or hockey in north america.
      • what does it look like? starcraft, passively, on a tv screen? scrolling? commentary?

        • I don't know exactly how the starcraft games might look, but when I lived in Hungary, there was a TV program where people playing Mario (!) were broadcast with commentary. These were regular guys off the street, which was easy to see, because they all kept dying in the first level from having a turtle bounce back at them.

    • The real question is: when will professional gaming take off?

      It already has, go to Korea some time. They have cable TV channels dedicated to broadcasting game competitions. There are clans of players with equivalent status to pro sports teams, they are celebreties. Read about it here [wired.com] as well as the associated slashdot discussion [slashdot.org]. From the article:


      Starcraft is not just a game in South Korea, it is a national sport, what football was in America in the 1970s. Five million people -- equivalent to 30 million in the US - play.

      [...]

      Chong points out a 20-year-old in an orange sweatshirt, immersed in online tactical warfare. "He's a pro gamer. Most of them practice 10 hours every day, like musicians," he says. "In Korea, people play games using the Internet like that. It's a kind of boom.


  • Al Lowe (the genius we all know and love as the creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series) and Ken Williamson humorously claim to have invented internet gaming while working at Sierra Online. Read the entire article here [allowe.com].
  • Looking back on all these games I wonder what their cumulative effect on the general culture of the U.S. is. Has the tiny minority of these games brought the concepts of the games to a wider audience, perhaps through movies or television?

    Or is the listing of all these MUDs more evidence of a geek subculture that sees itself as superior to society in general, so much so that it needs to withdraw and create more perfect worlds to exist within?
    • Or is the listing of all these MUDs more evidence of a geek subculture that sees itself as superior to society in general, so much so that it needs to withdraw and create more perfect worlds to exist within?

      Oh, please. How about "different from society in general?" When I was a young teenager, discovering BBSs and MUDs was probably the best thing that ever could have happened to me. For the first time in my lonely little life, I found myself immersed in 'worlds' inhabited by people who thought and acted like I did, who actually read books not assigned in school, who used their intelligence in creative ways.. It was my first exposure to people who didn't care about how you looked or who you hung out with, but what you said and did and how well you did it.

      Superior to reality? Nah, more like a release, an exploration. And yes, a subculture does need its own world to exist within. When I was in high school, the "jocks and cheerleaders" had their own little world of sports and parties -- but then, there were a lot more of them than there were of people like me. They could congregate easily in public. To find other people like myself, I had to go online.

      Gaming and BBSs sparked my interest in the internet, html, coding, networking -- and, of course, more gaming. I'm willing to bet that the cumulative effect was the same for many others. When I would play around on the internet in the school library (mind you, this was in 1992, so the "internet" looked a bit different -- but there was still e-mail!) even the non-geeky people would want to know things like how to make a "home page" or get e-mail.

      Cumulative effect on US culture in general? Well, we've got Britney Spears on AOL and all, and I won't categorize that as a good thing or a bad thing, but without the little gamer geeks decades ago... do you think that today, Suzi Cheerleader would know what instant messaging or e-mail was?
      • Britney Spears isn't wandering around some virtual dungeon while she's on AOL.

        Yes, the internet has had a pretty big impact in our culture, but it doesn't seem to me at least that gaming has had all that huge an effect. Sure, we've had Dungeons and Dragons [imdb.com] and Super Mario Bros. [imdb.com], but aside from these horrible movies, there doesn't seem to be any lasting impact of gaming, much less online gaming.
        • Gaming subculture contributed massively to the popularity of the internet, thereby affecting US culture in general.

          And boy.. if Britney Spears WAS wandering around some dungeon on AOL.. or maybe just some dungeon.. what a better place this world would be!
  • mirror at http://home.no.net/scoopy/mudtimeline.html
  • "It goes back as far as PLATO"

    Ah, yes, 5th Century BC Athens and Plato is writing eloquent prose such as this extract from "The Repulic" where he illustrates the Similie of the FPS.

    "Suppose, Glaucon, that we have a 3D virtual environment where people kill each other endlessly in per-pixel-shaded surroundings. And let us further suppose that while in this environment they can talk to each other, saying things like: 'I 0wn j00, suX0r!'. Would the players in this world think that what they were experiencing was reality, or that they were merely interacting with shadows?

    'Merely interacting with shadows, of course' Glaucon replied.

    Well then. Couldn't it be the same with us in the real world ? Might there not be a higher plane, the plane of forms, viewed from which we would appear to be merely shooting at shadows ?

    'I suppose it could be possible' replied Glaucon, mechanically.

    graspee

  • NWN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by flogger ( 524072 )
    Stormfront Studios' Neverwinter Nights launches on America Online. It was based on the Gold Box SSI AD&D games, and was programmed by Cathryn Mataga.

    NWN was the first experience I had with PvP (Well maybe the second -- I played a lot of Trade Wars [slashdot.org].) The game, even though it was on AOL was lot of fun and the best part of about it were the guilds. I spent a lot of time in the "Temple of Lloth" as Gomph and was a great lackey.
    I remember playing around with a Mad Cleric by the name of Holy Church that eventually got kicked off of AOL for his overzealous PVP tactics.

    NWN, back then was not supposed to be a PVP game, A player could not even hit another player with his/her sword when in an "encounter" with another. But it was dicovered that magic spells did have an effect on others. I think Mataga (the programmer)assumed people would cast spells to help each other. So spells like 'haste' were great. But where benificial spells helped, so did the bad spells. Fireball and hold person and lightning come to mind.

    Three years ago when I heard about Bioware [bioware.com] making NeverWinter nights, I was taken back down memory lane. (It's only been 10 years since I played on AOL... Argh!)
    • NWN, back then was not supposed to be a PVP game, A player could not even hit another player with his/her sword when in an "encounter" with another. But it was dicovered that magic spells did have an effect on others.

      Gemstone was not supposed to be PVP either, but there were problems with the occasional PK, usually named "Chucky", after Manson. They did eventually put in ways to notify GMs of PKing in town (one time when I was stuck in a guild building with no way out, myself and another character playfully plinked each other with rapiers, knowning the GMs would get notifies). In GS3, they added automatic arrest and fines for PK in town.

      Stealing they didn't have as much problem with, but the original GS2 implementation of pickpocketing allowed the thief to steal the backpack off your back! (It was stealing the wedding rings off of fingers that really pissed everyone off.) It also allowed you to steal the treasure off of genned monsters, leaving fields full of pissed off trolls with no treasure.

      I think Mataga (the programmer)assumed people would cast spells to help each other. So spells like 'haste' were great. But where benificial spells helped, so did the bad spells. Fireball and hold person and lightning come to mind.

      That is fscking twisted.

      Three years ago when I heard about Bioware [bioware.com] making NeverWinter nights, I was taken back down memory lane. (It's only been 10 years since I played on AOL... Argh!)

      I missed NWN on AOL (then again, I used a Mac, and it required a PC client based on the SSI game engine), but I eagerly await being able to set up my own world at home.

  • Anyone who used PLATO might want to check out platopeople.com...some good stuff there. Anyone remember a PLATO game called Drygulch? Multi-user, wild west mining game (with graphics), way ahead of its time (this was pre-Vic 20!).

    • Re:Plato (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 )
      For those who might be wondering what PLATO was, it was a system far ahead of its time. Kind of a preview of the world wide web in the 1970's. It was a mainframe-based system designed from the ground up for interactive graphic use in a teaching environment. It used cool orange flat panel plasma displays. I took a couple of classes that used PLATO for all of the homework and a lot of interactive teaching material.

      It supported hundreds of simultaneous interactive users all sharing a single mainframe that was probably less powerful than a 286, usually with snappy performance. Now, with "modern" OSes, a single CPU -- hundreds of times more powerful than the entire PLATO site -- supports a single user surfing the web, sometimes with sluggish performance. Sometimes it makes you wonder about progress and the concept of diminishing returns.

      • There is a bit of information out there about some things that started on PLATO that are now pretty much familiar to everyone. IMB/Lotus credit PLATO's "notes" [lotus.com] as being an inspiration for Notes/Domino. There is a nice summary of innovations on the system [uiuc.edu] including personal notes (email), multiplayer games, and most importantly "online community," by David Wooley. Brian Dear is also writing a book on PLATO people [platopeople.com] that also has some good history.

        Learning about PLATO makes a nice history lesson for both online gaming fans as well as people working in online education.

        It is not often I can sign a note as chris/mfl and an Orion Captain [classicgaming.com]

        • It's nice to see Plato getting its due at last. I spent a lot of time on Plato from 1983 to 1987 or '88, including programming in Tutor.
      • For those who might be wondering what PLATO was, it was a system far ahead of its time. Kind of a preview of the world wide web in the 1970's.

        Yeah, PLATO and NovaNET were way ahead of their time, in many ways. I count myself fortunate to have had a chance to "be there" while it was still in its prime.

        The original mainframes that ran PLATO are long gone, as far as I know. NovaNET was an attempt by UIUC to rejuvenate PLATO in the late 1980s, using custom designed hardware that implimented the Cyber instruction set. The system had a unique communications infrastructure, using hybrid one-way satellite/land-line return data delivery system to connect customers nationally. This allowed small sites to enjoy the power of PLATO without having to buy a CDC system of their own. It was amazingly responsive, despite the use of the satellite link. That system was later replaced by Internet connections and NovaNET running under emulation on Sun server hardware. The system is now owned by NCS/Pearson, and is is still being used by some K12/adult education sites. But its days are definately numbered.

        One interesting thing about PLATO systems is that the sense of user community was amazing. I think only a few on-line communities have ever reached the level of the PLATO systems (perhaps the WELL and some MU*s). The level of interactivty and features on the system went beyond what most people get on the 'net these days (if you don't count all of the web cams and p0rn). You could chat live with someone else, and actually see each individual key presses -- and get flustered by your inablity to type fast enough to keep up someone. Your could share your entire terminal screen with someone else to show what you were doing, or if you were having a problem. Help desk support staff were very knowledgable and usually responded personally within a few minutes to any request. There were discussion notesfiles on almost every topic. The user community was very active.

        I really don't think that instant messages or web boards give you the same kind of feel.

        And finally, the games were pretty impressive for the era. I personally lost about 5000 hours of my life to Avatar. (yes, really, 5000 hours -- the system keeps a log of your total usage) Nothing else was like it at the time, being able to play a dungeon kill-the-monsters game in a crude semi-3D enviroment while interacting in the game with 50 other people, on a 2400 bps dialup. And loving every minute of it.

    • I used to play Drygulch (and Empire) all the time back in the mid-80s. Drygulch was great, you had to delve the mine (something like a 30+? level maze, each floor something like 20x20 squares I think, it's been a while, but thru your mining you could actually deplete walls and clear a whole level) for ore, take it up to the assay office and cash it in for better supplies (all represented by little vector grachic icons of course) and sundries. You could traverse the badlands to find sister city, not an easy feat by anymeans but the sister mine was far richer). All in all a great game.

      But I spent the most time by far on Moria, that game was the ultimate. It was dungeon-crawling-roleplayingesque game with vector graphics in a small window in the center depicting the dungeon and the directions you could travel. The world was divide up into different terrains (forrest, dessert, mountains, etc) but of course everything looked like the same vector-wall dungeon, but hey that's where imagination comes into play! You only got one character at a time, and once dead that char was gone for good (only to be remembered in the hall of fame!) You could party with quite a few other players at a time (which of course you could never "see" in the dungeon, just on a list of who's in the room at the time) and go exploring. The max # of players was quite a few I think (greater than 30 I think). My last char I remember was pj17 (incremented every time I died). Anyone remember hunting for the Ring or discovering the hidden levels like the Ocean? (A longshot I know but what the hell)

      I was actually like a 4th/5th grader (read: zbrat) at the time so everything on a 'puter was cool then. Still though reading thru these sites makes me quite a bit nostalgic for those days.

      I wonder what would it take to resurrect those PLATO games to their former glory? I imagine copywrites, or a complete lack of source code would be a stumbling block. But, it's not like it'd take a lot of resources or bandwidth to host the whole thing (I used to connect at 9600 baud on the high end). I think I could put more time into those games (if the community was there of course) than into Neverwinter or EverQuest or any other so-called MMPORG. I wonder...
  • I can't believe they failed to mention the greatest computer game of all time, Nethack [nethack.org]!!! No history of gaming is complete without it...
  • From the timeline - 1973:

    "In "Dogfight," two players tried to shoot down each other's "airplane" ... Unfortunately, the person with the fastest connection to the main computer in Illinois usually won that game."

    Soooooo... 30 years later we're still basically in the same boat, only with prettier airplanes?
  • Damn, I still remember playing air warrior, spending untold $, paying by the minute to play. Those were the days. (anyone who played air warrior should check out aces high)

    Then there was the sierra network, redbaron online, etc, more money down the drain.

  • xpilot (Score:4, Informative)

    by Chris Hiner ( 4273 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @12:23AM (#4135377) Homepage
    No xpilot [xpilot.org] either on this list. That dates to 1991, and has been multiplayer since the start.

    • It's on the main xpilot page, but it's worth calling out the link to The Story of Xpilot [acm.org] from the ACM crossroads. It's the fascinating history of the development of xpilot back in the days when most people hadn't even considered that multiplayer games could exist.

      I still play xpilot today, btw, and although it can't keep up with the graphics of modern day games (or even 5 year old games) it's all about the gameplay, and it still has it there.

  • Reminiscing... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Tilps ( 226233 )
    6% Done. 6K of 100K (3:26:45 remaining)

    Lucky I dont need this web page to be able to reminise about the good ol days...

    Tilps
  • OK, I realise the reason why avid gamers who get immersed in EverQuest refer to the game as EverCrack in a light-hearted jab at themselves because the game is so addictive but doesn't using the Crack suffix just further damage the public's perception of the Internet, PC and console gaming and gamers in general?

    Isn't it enough that TV and print media already make the best of every opportunity that they get to bash any of these three things?

    If you believe the hype and hysteria then the Internet's full of paedophiles swapping pictures and preying on young children in chat rooms, games like GTA3, Gangsters, Tekken and Doom just glamorise and glorify violent behaviour and gamers are mal-adjusted, sedentary, social misfits with poor social skills that would rather sit on their fat asses all day than get a job, a friend or any kind of life.

    (Don't even get me started on how the media regards RPGs - anyone old enough to remember the golden age of table-top games will remember how insane the media were about that "corrupting influence".)

    EverQuest, like life itself, attracts many kinds of players. Some hardcore but most are casual. Some are openly aggressive but most are openly approachable. Some are complete jerks but most are just well-rounded human beings.

    Bottom line is this: playing EverQuest is no big deal. Sure, if you're devoting every waking hour to it then you have a problem (or, given the way the EverQuest community works, a viable business venture) but then that's true of just about anything.
  • We are in the early design stages of a turn-based strategy game. In the gaming industry, you're always asked "What's the BFI?" (Big Fucking Idea). If you don't have a BFI, it's just a rehash of an old game.

    Well the spin here is that I work at a TV channel (G4) - and therefore the idea is that the game will somehow integrate with some on-air elements within it's universe. (Live or pre-recorded). Not yet sure what those elements will be, but there are quite a few possibilities. (From just displaying stats to actually having some of the gameplay on TV, etc.)

    You can read the post here [g4tv.com], where we're soliciting input from the G4 community before starting development.

    -CySurflex

  • Many, Many Multiplayer works are probably missing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Optimizer ( 14168 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @01:08AM (#4135495)
    I have to assume that, becasue I doubt anyone remembers the first on-line multiplayer realtime game that I wrote* and there must have been a thousand others like me - individuals who wrote something that was enjoyed by a very small audience and then forgotten a few years later.

    * = in 1986, I wrote a game I inventively(ha!) called "CompuTrek" for the Computalk BBS in the Dallas/Ft Worth (Texas, USA) area - a 7-line BBS running on 48K RAM Atari 800's that shared access a 20 Mb hard-drive and had a hand-build gizmo to resolve write access contentions connected to joystick port #2 on each machine.

    The game was a real-time update of the classic '70 mainframe star trek, played on 64x64 grid. Players picked from one of 5 races and had money to outfit ships that were stored in asteroid bases when they were logged off. They could move around, (facing counted as they had front, rear, and side shields) and they earned money by blowing up ship of other races. 2400 baud modem users had a significant advantage over 1200 and 300 baud users.

    The problem was that 4 or 5 people really got hooked on the game -- and kept the lines BUSY to those computers.. this was back in the day when one user took an entire machine's resources. So only 1 or 2 or sometimes even none of the lines were available to other users. We tend to forget about that, but BBS users from the early 80s probably remember pulling stunts trying to beat the busy signals (like calling someone you suspect is on-line so that call waiting would disconnect them).

    In the process of having a few hard-core players hog the BBS, it naturally limited the number of other people who could find out about it and play. If there is one good thing about the 'Net as we know it today, it's that we can all be on it at the same time.

    For a long time, I though that CompuTrek would have been my only on-line game and no one but 10 or so people would even remember it, but then I wrote a bunch of the code for Age of Empires (and the games that followed it: Rise of Rome, AoE2:Age of Kings, and The Conquerors, which have been played by a million times more people. For that I am eternally humbled. (and eternally on a crusade to combat online cheating).

    -Mp
    • Quoth the poster:
      In the process of having a few hard-core players hog the BBS, it naturally limited the number of other people who could find out about it and play. If there is one good thing about the 'Net as we know it today, it's that we can all be on it at the same time.

      You can say this, with a straight face (I assume), on /., while the article linked to is severly bogged down because of some hard-core readers hog the connections, naturally limiting the number of other people who can read it.

      Quite impressive.

      (Solely humorous, and no disrespect to the parent should be assumed or inferred)

  • 1974: Notesfiles created on PLATO, the first BBSes, almost exactly like today's Usenet.
    2002: Notes still in use at my old high school, cause, despite a lock system that causes problems if you use it with nfs and the like, we haven't found a replacement that works nicely (the interface is wonderful; beats the heck out of webboards and the like)

  • Some BBS games that are missing..

    • Barren Realms Elite
    • Usurper
    • Legend of the Red Dragon (by Seth Able Robinson?!!)

    That is all

    • L.O.R.D. is listed on that page. It's under the year 1989.

      =-Jippy
    • Exactly what I was thinking... My favorite BBS carried about 6 or so games, these exact three, and tradewars were my favorites, particularly BRE. I was disappointed to see it overlooked, ah well.

      Steve
    • Also: Solar Realms Elite and Operation Overkill (II?) Those rocked. As a sysop I would often take the modem off-hook and play OOII in local mode. This was of course before multitasking worked well. DESQview was pretty good though.

      But, I can understand the desire to not start listing every multiplayer game but rather the first or most influential ones. Otherwise, it would read like a boring list of BBS door games.
  • What the hell is up with this timeline? The author goes into a lot of detail on what are apparently his favorite MUDs, but he totally skips over some of the most important advances that have enabled internet gaming and, thus, virtual worlds. What about IHHD (Internet Head to Head Daemon) which allowed people to play games like Descent against each other on the internet before even PPP accounts were widespread? What about Case's Ladder, one of the first widespread ladders for competitive gaming? What about kali, which was one of the first means for emulating IPX games over the internet. What about gaming leagues, such as the International Warcraft League (IWL)? I think the author of this timeline may have honestly wanted to create a good timeline, but to call it a "timeline of virtual worlds" is a little premature without doing all the research required. Just my $0.02.
  • Unfortunately, a very important piece of online gaming history is missing from this - 1985 - Pyroto Mountain! [pyrotomountain.com]

    This game had every BBS user in fits - the first addiction. Door games were interesting, but this was a BBS system rolled into an online game - one inextricable from the other. Luckily, it remains alive on the net - it just doesn't hold the same appeal without having to auto-dial until the BBS is free to take your daily turn.... ;)
  • I ran a BBS back in the day (of the BBS, not the dinosaurs - I'm not *that* old!). It was one of those warez BBSs with a shareware/public domain file library as a front. Unfortunatly, appearing to be a shareware BBS had its disadvantages - namely it attracted people who loved playing online games.

    Okay, so it was really my fault for downloading and setting up a few doors to keep the warez kiddies distracted while their upload/download ratio was out of whack, but after installing TradeWars 2002, LORD and Usurper, that was pretty much the death setence for the file libraries. Everyone just logged in to kill each other while they were asleep in a hotel or under a tree. While my BBS was primarially a one line system, I eventually went multinode towards the end of its popularity (as a futile attempt to make it more interesting, even though I knew the Internet would swallow all my users). During its days as a 2-line system, I saw few users actually battle each other online. For the most part, one would be downloading a file, the other would be upset that the other user is unavailble due to a file transfer and page me to see if I'd abort their file transfer. (No, I didn't abort it, I wasn't a BOFH.)

    I think the real thing I miss about the days of the BBS is being able to create your own community. Nowadays, you set up a web page with a message forum and just get posts by anonymous cowards going "This place sucks, head on over to www.bettersite.com where there's more people!" Oh yea, and I also miss Zmodem. ;)
  • I was called shaitan, I cant remember the name of the guild anymore, even tho I was a Prince. Yserbius was awesome in its day. I have often wondered where all the other Yserbius players have gone to for their fix. Im sure they are scattered about and have run into one a year or so ago on IRC.

    Man those days when it was such a small community will never happen again. The net is just to large now.

    Seek3r
  • Anyone remember Infinity Complex for MajorBBS? It was an insane game consisting of blowing each other up and creating the world yourself, by dynamiting new tunnels in a large cubic area of underground rock.

    Also left out is the venerable Quest for Magic, which came with MajorBBS for free. A very small game but a lot of fun - as an alternative for chatting with people instead of using teleconference.

    The real deal fantasy game that you had to buy seperately was Kyrandia, and Galatic Empires was the TradeWars clone of the day.

    --Mike

    P.S. Hello Infernoites!

    • How about TeleArena? Where'd that thing go?

      That was one of the very few games that I would still play today if I could. Of course, it was all about the other players too.
      • There are still a few BBS systems out there connected to the Internet running Tele-Arena.
        Sean Ferrel the author seems to have disappeared from the planet.
        I was suprised this "timeline" had no mention of Galacticom MajorBBS/Worldgroup based multi-user games like Tele-Arena, MajorMUD, GE, etc.
        Allot of people got their start playing multi-user games on Galacticom BBS systems.
  • Looking at the article, things are pretty much right on in my memory. All that we take for granted now, Usenet, multiplayer games, chat rooms, and email, we took for granted back in the 70s on the University of Illinois PLATO system.

    It had bitmapped graphics (well, sorta), sprites (well, sorta), and wonderful monochrome orange plasma screens. The beauty of using plasma screens was that once you told a plasma pixel to turn on, it wouldn't turn off again, so you didn't have to have video memory. And you got your game graphics from downloadable fonts, called charsets, so you just "printed" different characters next to each other to get an orc or a mage.

    And all this from a computer system that was made to let non-computer-science instructors create lessons for their students (hah!).

    You can find more history on PLATO here [classicgaming.com]. Definitely follow the NEXT links at the bottom of the pages.

    I tried looking at what PLATO has, um, evolved into, but www.plato.com just doesn't do games.

  • too much missing. (Score:5, Informative)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @02:39AM (#4135688) Homepage Journal


    Few things missing..

    He mentions ten, but forgets kali [kali.net] and kahn (sorry no link) Kali was the first commercial IPX tcp wrapper. Duke nukem, doom, descent were all played over kali.

    Also to note, dwango. The thresh sponsored dial up doom networking service.

    Then onto Ultima Online [uo.com] for the first graphical mmorpg.

    Too much missing for my taste.

  • Note to those looking for staying power: the 1974 game Empire is still being played and developed today as Netrek [netrek.org]. The name has changed, the Klingons are back, the graphics and sound have improved and the galaxy has been shrunk to make for fast, intense games, but the essential gameplay is unchanged. 28 years and counting.

  • I cut my MUDding teeth on Valhalla, starting round about 1990 or so. Here's some more info [lysator.liu.se] about Valhalla, since George Reese's timeline isn't available any more at imaginary.com.

    Valhalla was an awesome online environment. It beat the hell out of the BBSes of the time, and it kept getting better as more and more areas were added. I got all the rush of EQ from it 10 years before EQ ever happened, and I still get that same rush daily. Valhalla ceased to be in October 1997, but was reincarnated shortly thereafter (under new management) as Asgard's Honor. The admins and lib versions for Asgard have changed a bit from that link up there, but all the gameplay descriptions are still accurate, and a lot of the old Val players migrated to Asgard. I played on Val and now on Asgard as Silence.

    Our web page is at ahonor.betterbox.net [betterbox.net]. We're currently in the process of updating it with all sorts of additional information. If you're looking for an online experience that isn't driven by profit but by having fun; where you can kill monsters, gain spells, chat with old friends and make new ones; and where you can talk directly with the people building the world, by all means stop in! Log in as 'guest', or create a character; either way, we'd love to have you check us out [209.83.132.66]. I'm usually on every day, and I love to help out newbies.

    -- Silence

  • Rape in Cyberspace [levity.com] was on that page and was a really good short story about one of the earliest examples of a person whose primary goal is annoying everybody else. (You know the type. Don't be that type.) I say it's a good story, not necessarily because it's something that you won't be able to put down. In fact it's rather long. But it effected quite a debate in class when some people believed that using the word rape was appropriate and others insisting not.

    I'd be interested to hear what fellow geeks think of the matter? Is rape too severe a word to describe what happened? Is this kind of rape as traumatic as the standard method? I say no. And if you say yes, you might just be the type that can win arguments... but what do you believe?

  • I know BatMUD [bat.org], (1990) still is alive and kicking. Actually it has been constantly growing during the 8 years I've been more or less around... But are there any older online games that are still more popular than their early days. ++Noitatohtori
  • Reading this timeline produced two feelings in me.

    First, I felt old, because I remember playing a lot of those games when they first came out, especially the ones in the 70's and 80's.

    Second, I felt sad. The first half of the list starts out in the form "so and so and such and such developed a really cool what ever". By the end of the list, though, its mostly "so and so sued such and such over what ever", or "so and so shut down what ever".
  • It is noteworty to mention that Raph Koster was formerly "Designer Dragon" at Origin, and was responsible for the evolution of one of the most seminal games of recent times, Ultima Online.

    I know it's too late to hope for much upvoting, but I think it's important to know that this is the person who wrote that "History". Yes, he did slant it, but that's his background.

    It's too bad UO was "patched to death," by in large because of Koster and company. *sigh*
  • I noticed the timeline doesn't include expansion packs for some games.

    They don't matter?

    Some don't. But some do, as they contain MASSIVE improvements in the graphics engine, to take an already immersive game and make it even more realistic.

    I get the impression that EQ's Shadows of Luclin expansion is such an engine improvement, as it's listed by NVIDIA as using MANY more features than previous games.

    Dark Age of Camelot's new expansion pack is also such an example - It's going to use the per-pixel shaders, etc. to make the engine MUCH more realistic. It was officially announced a while ago, and supposedly will be out in late Fall 2002.
  • PLATO, "Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations", a network running on the ILLIAC computer system.

    No version of PLATO ever ran on ILLIAC. PLATO I was a single user system prototyped on an early IBM system written in FORTRAN of all things. Multiuser gaming on PLATO however really didn't start at all until PLATO III which ran on a Control Data Corporation Cyber 1604 (Seymour Cray's first "supercomputer" by many accounts).

    Although lost in the mists of time there was some on-campus rivalry between the ILLIAC and PLATO projects as indicated by the grafitti on the roof of a building next to the high-rise apartment in which I stayed while writing the second version of Spasim [geocities.com]: "PLATO Sucks ILLIAC IV". The real reason for this rivalry was probably the age-old competition between faster scalar processing and massively parallel processing architectures. The PLATO culture was hard-over into Seymour Cray's fast scalar processing architectures. PLATO folks largely saw massively parallel processing architectures as a cop-out by pussies who just didn't have what it took to build computers that did real things economically and fast.

  • Hey Ralph, you forgot Spasim [geocities.com] (1974) which I claim (in my not so humble opinion) to be the first multiplayer first person shooter VR game and it may be the first single-user of that genre.

    It should be noted that in my Spasim web page I credited Kevin Gorey with the creation of Airfight and Brand Fortner with continuing later work on Airfight (the bulk of the work). Brand Fortner disputes this claiming he originated Airfight. This is something that needs to be ferreted out. The long period of time between then and now leads many of us to remember things different ways and my recollection may be in error on this.

    PS: No one present at PLATO circa 1974 disputes the priority of Spasim in 3D games to the best of my knowledge.

  • About the timeline (Score:2, Informative)

    by RaphKoster ( 603840 )
    Never expected to get slashdotted. :)

    Please feel free to mail me corrections and additions to the timeline. The vast majority of it was not written by me, it was written by others who submitted material.

    Some blanket replies to clarify the intent of the timeline:

    Tolkien is listed because he was very influential on the people making those early games (annd still is to this day). To take another example, Lord Dunsany is comparably important in the development of fantasy as a genre, but has not had very discernable influence on online worlds specifically.

    The Sega channel probably does deserve to be listed. Please feel free to send details. Note, however, that this timeline is specifically about online worlds (aka muds, MMORPGs, virtual realities, what have you), not about peer to peer gaming except insofar as instances of peer to peer gaming serve as bridges towards online worlds. Hence the absence of things like Case's Ladder or Kali. Heck, Quake is only in there because it brought greater awareness to online worlds in the process of being a big hit.

    Lastly, concerning the title... AFAIK, there are only four significant timelines on the history of online worlds on the Net. There's George Reese's, there's The MUDDex's [apocalypse.org], there's Jessica Mulligan's on Biting the Hand [skotos.net], and there's mine. Of these, George's is centered on LPMuds, The MUDDex centered on MOOs and MUSHes, Jessica's on commercial games, and then there's mine which tries to cover all the above. Plus, George and Jess both contributed to mine. As of right now, there is no more comprehensive source on the Internet--at least, not that's indexed by any search engines. Believe me, I've looked. For a preliminary links list of resources for online world design, I refer you to my list. [legendmud.org]

    The genesis of the timeline was actually as some research to help out Dr Amy Bruckman (MediaMOO, MOOse Crossing) for a Game Developer's Conference panel we were both on. It has been posted regularly to rec.games.mud.* newsgroups and the MUD-Dev mailing list [kanga.nu] as well. It's very much a community effort, and not based on my personal preferences save for the criteria by which I determine whether or not something is an actually an online world.

    I see a lot of posts here in the replies which I intend to scarf up and add to the timeline, though. So thanks to those posters. :) Certainly one area where the timeline is deficient is the entire area of BBS games, so submissions are definitely welcome there.

    -Raph Koster

    • Please feel free to mail me corrections and additions to the timeline. The vast majority of it was not written by me, it was written by others who submitted material.

      About the "origin" of FRP. I think Dunsany is a good addition to the "Tolkien Synoptic" view of fantasy origins, but to be honest, Dungeons and Dragons and much of the urban- and dungeon-based fantasy material around today owes much of its genesis to Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser [fictionwise.com] "sword and sorcery" series (a phrase he coined). Oh, and Moorcock with the Eternal Champion series. Tolkien's stuff was just too damn full of *elves* and floppy ears and singing -- Leiber and Moorcock wrote convincingly about *people* in fantastic situations.
  • Snipes was the first graphical online game I ever played... well, graphical as in ASCII graphics, but it was a lot of fun (and put a pretty big strain on our LAN). That was back in 1991 IIRC.

  • A friend of mine tested Meridian 59 when it was in Beta. It was a cool game for the time. We were some of the thousands then who got the idea that we should make our own game. We figured out all these things and wrote all over whiteboards for days during the summer. (Some of it's still on the whiteboards on the walls at his parent's house). Neither of us really had any programming experience at the time, so we were kinda stuck with some ideas, but not much more.

    Then I got in the on the alpha test of Sierra's The Realm. Unlike M59, The Realm was addictive to us. We sat there waiting for the server to connect, for patches to download over our 56K (well it only really connected at 26,400) connection. It was great, and we were hooked. I actually liked The Realm Alpha better than the Beta for the most part, and far more than the Final. The Final seemed to be mainly about who was logged on when the GMs decieded to give away 'special' items (which became a norm in MMORPGs). The graphics were actually pretty cool for the time and we wanted to research more about these games.

    So we came upon Ultima Online. At the time it was little more than a web page with a black background, and an FAQ. The ideas from the FAQ were awesome though. Ideas such as animals coming from other animals, storming castles, owning property (which you did in the Realm, but you couldn't steal from others easily without conning them out of stuff. I got a Lit Orb this way), a stong economic system, and a huge world that you would take a day or two to travel.

    We instantly formed guilds and for the hell of it declaired War on each other, even though Alpha wasn't even out yet. We were drooling over pictures that were leaking in from alpha though. The whole idea rocked. We got passwords from somewhere to a site that was being developed with info about the beta and got in there (huge leak, thousands accessed it).

    Then we got the Beta CDs, I still have mine. At the time UO would run on a 486 DX/4 with little problems, so his blazinly fast P120 Laptop, and my P90 desktop were all good. For some reason the requirements have gone up alot, even though they haven't added much really. The Beta rocked. We were a little dispointed by some things, but some things got better and some worse.
    The ecomonmy at first was great. You started off with nothing by a knife that was nearly worthless, and a few other little things. No gold. Now players start off with 1000 gold. Amazing. We started in Vesper (I think that's the name), and stayed around the beach alot. I remember both of us running around, mainly away from creatures that we were dumb enough to attack. It was hard to get gold or good items at the time. We would draw guards to the beach, and wait for someone to try to pickpocket others, and then mob the bodies and take their things.

    Ah, some things never came into being though. We never got a tight ecomony. It got worse. Things weren't supposed to 'spawn' according the initial FAQ, but they did. And it killed it. Land became too scarce after the server wipes slowed down, and the game got too many powerful players, that made it unfun to roleplay.

    We actually did get real accounts when the game came out. (It was a long beta, but the Realm Alpha and Beta was over a year). Games today don't normally have long Betas for some reason. I guess they want to make money back sooner than later. We ended up with a Castle on one server, which we put a ton of things in because our banks were overflowing. I was always a mage, and not a tank at all, so fighting was hard for me. I made more money safely by making scrolls. Another memory from first playing the game was becoming a GM at Eval Int and Anatomy in about 10 minutes just by using it. I think something was messed up at the time. I got killed by a harpy then, and for some reason, was evil because I had killed an animal I congured up, so I didn't know where to Rez.

    We Lost the castle, because someone put tents in front of it. We couldn't get in, but someone else had been able to break and and took everything. We had the place full with stuff, but at the time you couldn't secure anything. I stopped playing for a while.

    I played AC for a little bit, and then Everquest. Neither of them had been quite the same. I later tested Anarachy Online, and thought it was what EQ should have been, but wasn't. I didn't play that for long either because I had school, and the servers sucked. UO had such a sense of wonder, and mystery to it at the right times.
    What I like most about MMORPGs is the feeling that you first get while playing them. You are nothing, you are lost. You don't know all the 'tricks', you don't know how to make a ton of money instantly, and you are afriad of little things. It feels harder, because later it gets absurd and pointless feeling (which it is but...)

    The worst thing that games do is break away from their initial ideas. They don't go through with things that would have worked. Look at UO now, ships are nearly useless. They should have had huge pirate ships, made ship travel important. Had caravans that traveled around the world, etc. NOPE, all you have to do to go somewhere is have a tank cast gate, and go there. Nothing dangerous, nothing special. It groups were forced to ban together to travel, and do things, it would have been better. But instead magic screwed the whole thing. It would have made a much more interesting economy and world structure. I want to try Neverwinter Nights. Currently I am not playing anything, because well, there aren't any good betas that I have gotten into lately, and I just dont' feel like paying for a game that I won't play much. I have too much to do. Oh well,

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