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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
Favorite
> 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?
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
It nice to see Tradwars on it. Haven't seen that and years.
Here is a Mirror
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.
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.
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?
- colin
Was anybody here in a Yserbius clan called TnT?
Just curious.
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.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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?
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
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
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
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
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.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
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?
I have been pwned because my
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
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!)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
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!).
I can't believe they failed to mention the greatest computer game of all time, Nethack!!! No history of gaming is complete without it...
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
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."
| - | - |
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.
From the timeline - 1973:
... Unfortunately, the person with the fastest connection to the main computer in Illinois usually won that game."
"In "Dogfight," two players tried to shoot down each other's "airplane"
Soooooo... 30 years later we're still basically in the same boat, only with prettier airplanes?
You mean Harper College is actually somewhat known for something outside of the NW suburbs of Chicago?
:)
Wow, I might just have to go back and enroll again
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.
what does it look like? starcraft, passively, on a tv screen? scrolling? commentary?
No xpilot either on this list. That dates to 1991, and has been multiplayer since the start.
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
Sigs are for wimps. I am proud to be one.
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
There is an online version of Tradewars written in PHP. Check out http://www.blacknova.net/. I wasted three or four days on it, but it didn't grip me like the original.
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?
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
You took the words right out of my mouth, timelines are usually not complete but this one seems pretty good to me. It looks like the guy put a lot of work into it anyway...and with slashdot posters filling in the blanks and having it updated there will hopefully be nothing left to complain about.
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 and Super Mario Bros., but aside from these horrible movies, there doesn't seem to be any lasting impact of gaming, much less online gaming.
I have been pwned because my
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, where we're soliciting input from the G4 community before starting development.
-CySurflex
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
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..
That is all
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.
He has been trolled. He has won. Give him more karma.
Unfortunately, a very important piece of online gaming history is missing from this - 1985 - Pyroto Mountain!
;)
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....
L.O.R.D. is listed on that page. It's under the year 1989.
=-Jippy
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.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
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)
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
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!
That why I used the mirror site
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.
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. 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.
Is this thing on? Hello?
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.
Note to those looking for staying power: the 1974 game Empire is still being played and developed today as Netrek. 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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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. 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. I'm usually on every day, and I love to help out newbies.
-- Silence
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
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 , (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
++K
<[letter kay][at][number seventy seven][dot][finnish TLD]>
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".
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
While I've only been mudding for 7 years or so (Thats a long time when your 19), Reading this time line was really quite interesting. Reading all these posts on the other hand, left me with the thought of pity for the older generation. Dont just sit there and mutter over the loss of your favorite online worlds, wether they be via BBS, MU*s or any other means. Go Find another and jump back in where you left off. For my money, theres no site more helpful than Mudconnector for finding a MU* to solve those text based RPG'ing jonses.
Just a thought.. I dont like seeing people miserable over loses that they can atleast partially satiate.
Derg
I'm a little tea pot.
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*
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'd like to see a modem speed chart to see the comparison between games and when they became accessible to more than just the university students who wrote them.
I played my first MUD on the Essex Computer (Richard Bartlet's one) by dialing into the UK's JANET (Joint Academic Network) at 4am in the morning on a Pace Nightingale 300 baud modem. This must have been 1980 or so. It had to be in the morning because the MUD was only allowed to run from 11pm to 6am to conserve computing resources!
Playing this game inspired me to write my own MUD for the BBC computer running over an ECONET network. It was a wonderful combination of BASIC and assembler but supported 10 or 20 users and ran on a massively expanded 128k RAM BBC Master with a 2nd 6502 processor and a 1 megabyte Winchester harddrive. Those were the days.
Cliff
When the post-modern Internet appeared fifteen years later (you know, when Mosaic was the only graphical web browser available), I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. PLATO had it all: e-mail, term-talk, and real-time multi-player games like Oubliette and Empire. In fact, it took the Internet another five years to develop the latter.
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
Subspace was a classic beta online game that a lot of people played. Think asteroids meets quake. It kind of died out when it went commercial though.
...So, really, Subspace still rules... but considering the beta came out in 1997, still not sure about Classic
Uhhh... (quickly does a ?usage command)... I've logged several hundred hours in the last year playing Subspace. Its not owned by Virgin anymore. You can pick up a free copy of the client, now called Continuum, here. The game is a fast paced mixture of strategy and action played real time with other players. There are usually about 1000 or so people playing at any time.
It takes about a week to go from bad to good. It takes months or years to go from good to really good. My favorite arena is Extreme Games. I always fly the spider. (D*$#@ cloakers!)
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
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: "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.
Seastead this.
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.
Seastead this.
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
Trek 2.8 (google-able as trek28.zip) has roots in CP/M; born a character-based two-player game with separate galaxies. It was re-written for DOS (1987?) and used a 4 color CGA graphics mode - very snappy response at 9600 baud - still playable at 1200 baud.
Countless hours with my sons over a 50 foot serial cable, as well as late nights / early mornings over local and long-distance modem connections with geek buddies...anyone else remember that old gem?
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Cig:
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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.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Slightly OT, but related to our good ol' BBS days. I was just talking to somebody about the good old BBS days, when the community of local nerds used to get together and play LORD or Planets: TEOS...
./ effect would probably fry one of those...
Anyone know a place where there are similar games to play online? I found one site that was more or less BBS-game-like, but the actual play was quite restricted and somewhat droll... I quit after the first 3 weeks or so. I'd rather find a decent site than have a post for somebody's personal Telnet BBS... since the
But anyhow, any suggestions?
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,
Tibbon
tibbon.com
One of the spin-offs from Sojourn was (is!) Duris mud (telnet durismud.org 6666). I've been playing it since 1996 or there abouts, and its still fun. Its a racewars themed mud, with full player-killing, although there are in-game deterrents to spam killing (such as a justice system). The fun comes from fighting against other people instead of just endlessly killing the dragon for your +5 platemail of spankiness.
It also has one of the most developed mud codebases around, with a top down world map, and a full ship-to-ship combat system.
-- Microsoft is the best becau[INVALID PAGE FAULT IN MODULE Signature.exe AT ADDRESS 0x4353]
Then why don't you send them this information.
With the amount of things already researched on the timeline, I'm sure they would like a few more additions
"Who am I" and "Why are we here" are not the problems.
The problem is when someone asks "Why are they here."
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 "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.
Da Blog