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