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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.
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
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You are, unfortunately, incorrect in stating that they didn't do -any- research on this. Hell, I'm one of the damned sources cited in the timeline.
I know for a -fact- that they spent over a year talking with folks involved in the development on online gaming over the years, while putting this thing together. Additionally, online gaming has traditionally meant -multiplayer- online gaming.
Neener.
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.) 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 making NeverWinter nights, I was taken back down memory lane. (It's only been 10 years since I played on AOL... Argh!)
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
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.
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
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.
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Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
Actually, Carmack works for his own company designing rockets. http://www.armadilloaerospace.com