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Timeline of Online Gaming

Posted by michael on 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.

3 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. They missed quite a few games. :( by MsWillow · · Score: 3, Informative

    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*

    --

    Lemon curry?
  2. xpilot by Chris+Hiner · · Score: 4, Informative

    No xpilot either on this list. That dates to 1991, and has been multiplayer since the start.

  3. too much missing. by t0qer · · Score: 5, Informative


    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.