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The Most Important Multiplayer Games Ever
Gamasutra's 'Quantum Leap' awards roll on, with game developers voting in the titles they see as the most important multiplayer titles ever made. These are non-massive multiplayer games that significantly advanced the pastime of playing videogames with other people. Some of the listed games are gimmes (Goldeneye, Tribes), but I thought an Anonymous submitter's comment about humble Pokémon was interesting: "Tajiri-san's introduction of the collect and trade concept opened the eyes of every developer, all of whom previously believed multiplayer was either head-to-head or cooperative. What Pokémon created with this breakthrough concept was a true sense of community centered about a game - a kinship among people which transcended the immediate game environment. With the inclusion of real-world Pokémon merchandise, and a constant flow of new, wicked-cute characters, it was easy for anyone to embrace the Pokémon lifestyle...not that I would ever admit to it." Any multiplayer classics you'd add to the list?
Total Annihilation, the first 3D multiplayer strategy game.
Numerous MUDs for introducing the basic concept. Numerous Arcade / Home Console Classics for further introducing the GUI version of cooperative and adversarial interaction (e.g. Mortal Combat, Pong, Mario Brothers, Gauntlet...) If I had to choose one, I guess it would be Wizard of Wor, both cooperative and adversarial, and one of the first. I really would select Ultima Online except for the fact that it is an MMORPG and that is against the article's stated goal. I would not choose it for its MMORPG state, but for the way groups had to work together and the fact that it was the first of that nature that went big. Even if it hadn't been an MMORPG, the basic concepts were there similar to games like Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Etc. that required teamwork beyond you and one other person. Sharing supplies, using skills that augmented and/or supplemented your ally's skills, etc.
They're different animals, to be sure. I started out on consoles and had a heck of a time getting used to NOT being able to keep tabs. Certainly, it's a less realistic mode of play... I just viewed it as a particular gameplay element within the game. My friends and I actually rigged up four TVs, all running the same av feed from an N64, facing away from one another and each 3/4s covered with cardboard (it was the trashiest setup in video game history) so that we could play with 'solo' screens. I'm a big fan of Halo, Half-Life and Gears of War today, but I still say Goldeneye plays better when you can see your opponents' screens. I generally dislike radar in FPS's, too. I just think splitscreen in Goldeneye works for some reason. Nathan
No.
Doom predates UT.
Doom spawned (scuse the pun) a new genere of the multiplayer game.
Does it go on forever?
I wasted way too much of my life back then on Street Fighter II.
From my perspective, what SFII did to revolutionize video games is create a massive social aspect to visiting an arcade. It was not at all uncommon to see twenty or more people gathered around one arcade machine trying to keep track of who had their quarter in next. You could play complete strangers and have long conversations about the merits of Ryu vs. Ken, if Vega was a "cheap" character and how last week you saw some asian dude beat everyone while using Chun-Li.
When Champion Edition came out my friends and I traveled to arcades all over the city where we heard they had the game. I got kicked out of my favorite pizza parlor for "stringing" the game (taping a thread to a quarter to get tons of games).
I made more friends playing SFII than I did doing any other activity in my youth, including playing sports and going to school.
I have fond memories of the game, but I have no desire to buy the XBLA version of it. I've long since grown beyond those kinds of games.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Wikipedia says it all:
M.U.L.E. is a seminal multiplayer video game written in 1983 by Dan Bunten of Ozark Softscape. It was published by Electronic Arts. It was originally written for the Atari 400/800 and then was ported to the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System and to the IBM PC Jr.. While it played like a game, it was actually an economic simulation taking place on a small colony planet.
In 1996 Computer Gaming World named M.U.L.E. as #3 on its Best Games of All Time list on the PC.
Essentially, the game is an exercise in supply and demand economics that is set in space on the planet Irata (which is Atari backwards) and involves competition among four players. To win the game, the players not only must compete against each other, but they need to cooperate with each other for the survival of the colony. Central to the game is the acquisition and use of "M.U.L.E."s (Multiple Use Labor Element) to develop and harvest the player's real estate which can consist of: Energy, Food, Smithore (from which M.U.L.E.s are constructed), and Crystite. Players must balance supply and demand of these four elements (Crystite is available as an option during Tournament play only) as well as other events such as fires, theft, etc.
M.U.L.E. was revolutionary in the ease with which it allowed multiplayer interaction through a single game/computer console. (Its development came years before the advent of multiplayer Internet connectivity.) Though this failed as a trend setter at the time, the game is still heralded as the first game to make effective use of the multiplayer game concept.
The game was very popular in its day among certain groups. It did not become a bestselling title, but it has more recently become a favorite of retrogaming enthusiasts. Various clones for modern computers exist, the most recent commercial clone published in 2002. The original's addictive theme song by Roy Glover has been widely covered by remix groups.
Dani Bunten (previously Dan Bunten) was working on an Internet version of the game until her death in 1998.
Many game designers cite the game as one of the most revolutionary ever and an inspiration for many of their games. Will Wright dedicated his game The Sims, the greatest selling computer game of all time, to the memory of Bunten.
A modern version of the game entitled Space HoRSE was developed in 2004 by Gilligames and is distributed by Shrapnel Games.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Having lots of people play it doesn't make it revolutionary. Fact is that WoW is simply an upgrade/clone of EQ, which was an upgrade/clone of UO, which was....
They're just remaking the same game over and over again. If you're going to talk about MMORPGs, then I can really only endorse Ultima Online which started the whole genre, or GuildWars which did away with subscription fees. Neither was particularly revolutionary, though.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The first multiplayer game I ever really got addicted to was Descent II over a serial link (this predated the time when computers typically had built-in NICs). My dad and I would sometimes fight each other and sometimes play co-op. I remember dialing in and using Kali to emulate a local IPX network so I could play Descent II with people from who-knows-where.
I never got tired of people's responses when they found out that I wasn't using anything but a keyboard while keeping up with the top players in each game B-)
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Quake is listed for the reason you're describing, which is basically creating the multiplayer internet FPS genre. The reason Q3 is listed is not for creating deathmatch, but for REFINING deathmatch. Q3 is still the most balanced, competitive, and skill-based tournament FPS in the market. That is why it's listed. UT didn't bring anything "new" to the table that was revolutionary when compared to the aforementioned Tribes and Quake, and was nowhere near as refined as Q3 for tournament play. Even after they tried to refine it with UT 2k3, it still flopped on the competitive scene completely.
What? The day it came out on the net, four guys I worked with were playing multiplayer deathmatch on the corporate LAN after work. id used broadcast mode, though, and they got busted when an IT guy from another site twenty miles away drove over to see what the hell was messing with the network.
:)
They got away with it by giving him a copy of the game.
Within a few days, there probably weren't many companies that weren't filtering port 666.