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Timeline of Online Gaming
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.
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.
:) I wrote a cheesy knockoff, called SPACE, on my Schaumburg High account, S-350.
:)
:) 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*
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
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
Lemon curry?
Trade Wars 2002, for those that were not into the BBS scene, was a graphical (Ansi Graphics in the menus anyway--everything else was Text based)game where you explored around a universe through "Warp Points" and traded for a profit.
The trader would buy mineral or food or some other item to load up the holds on a freighter ship. Then the trader would ward to another system that was looking to buy the items you had to sell. With the profit you could upgrade your ship and buy fighters to attack other players!
The trader had a certain number of turns each day to do everything (better ships had more turns); and when the trader ran out of turns, that is where he/she stopped until more turns were awarded the next day. I found it golden when I found a traders ship with no fighters when I had my Federation starship (so the names were't that original).
My favorite tactic was to blow up a trader's ship, send out probes to see where his/her escape pod went to. Get the escape pod, and tow it to a dead end sector and place a crap-load of space mines in the next, "escape" sector. When the trader logged in on the next day, he/she would see that they were attacked, but still alive. Then when he/she would go to the stardock to buy a new ship...Blammo! hehe
This game was also a team game with "corporations" for teams. You could let people into your corporation and populate planets that had massive fighter production etc etc etc...
Even the "Underground" element of the game was great. Traders could put bounties on each other. It was great.
To those that played in Bloomington/Normal Area in 91-95, on the BBSes of Castle Roogna, Tragic Flaw, Tragic Flaw II, Prarie BBS, and "Carl's BBS" (I can't remember the name--Damn I'm getting old): I salute you, Trader Mick, Magician Humphrey, Richard Speck, Dragon Lady, Mac, and others. I was know and feared as "Captain Phooey".
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
No xpilot either on this list. That dates to 1991, and has been multiplayer since the start.
Few things missing..
He mentions ten, but forgets kali 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 for the first graphical mmorpg.
Too much missing for my taste.
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, there's Jessica Mulligan's on Biting the Hand, 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.
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 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