Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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
"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
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?
No xpilot either on this list. That dates to 1991, and has been multiplayer since the start.
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.
That dragon was nasty.
I preferred bedding Lily(think that was her name)
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
Some BBS games that are missing..
That is all
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.
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.
do not read this line twice.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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