from PLATO to MUDs to MMORPGs and beyond

There is a common misconception that online gaming started during the commercialization of the Internet where it attracted a wide market of users but in reality, it predated that era by several decades. In early days of online gaming, players had accessed to technologies that are not readily accessible to the public. In fact, the earliest games were simulations found only in military installations and as a result they were developed and have evolved away from the public eye. Only after the world wide web came to consumer use that they gained attention and popularity.

PLATO

Online gaming all started with PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), introduced in 1961 at the University of Illinois. This system was intended for research in the area of computerized education but Rick Blomme turned it into a multiplayer game network platform. Out of PLATO came a two player version of Steve Russel’s Spacewar catalyzing a new phenomenon in gaming. After that came a 32-player Star Trek inspired game, a flight simulator called Airfight and may others, but arguably the most important contribution was the Talk-O-Matic which foreshadowed the importance of social interactions in online games.

Talk-O-Matic pioneered online forums and message boards, emails, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games, leading to an emergence of what can be considered as the world’s first online community.

It was also PLATO that ushered the beginning of online role-playing games (orpg), which are now played at a massive scale (mmorpgs), with thousands of simultaneous players.

MUDs

MUDs or Multi-User Dungeons first appeared in 1978 and was first implemented by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University. As the Essex network later became part of ARPAnet – an academic institution which was the basis of what is now known as the Internet, students and researchers connected to the network started creating their own MUDs with the freely available code. This ability to design their own environment, helped build social interaction and player design into the online gaming tradition.

Islands of Kesmai

The first ISP, CompuServe readily recognized the monetary implications of letting subscribers play games over a public network. Teaming up with developers John Taylor and Kelton Flinn of Kesmai Corporation, they released ASCII-text role playing games such as Islands of Kesmai and Megawars I, charging customers to upto $12/hour to play these games, and launched the first ever commercial online gaming.

Quantum Link and Ultima

In response to CompuServe’s online gaming services, Quantum Link (the predecessor of AoL) released the first graphics-based online game, the Habitat, developed by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar at LucasFilms, advancing even more the online gaming experience. Then in 1991 Richard Garriot of Origin Systems approached Quantum Link to develop Ultima Online – an online version of the successful Ultima series.

GEnie

The GE Network for Information Exchange was an online service provider and a direct competitor of CompuServe and Quantum Link. Kelton Flinn of Kesmai Games developed Air Warrior, a World War II flight simulator, for GEnie. Air Warrior became a ground breaking success featuring the first graphically based massively multiplayer online game. GEnie established itself as the premier online service provider for multiplayer games licensing tiles like AUSI’s Galaxy II and Simutronic’s Orb Wars.

NCSA Mosaic

The development of NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical web browser by Mark Andreessen in 1993, accelerated the development of online multiplayer segment by opening the global network to the commercial world and the general public. On the same year, id Software released Doom which allows up to four players to connect via LAN and play against each other in a death match.

The company’s next title, Quake, featured even more sophisticated improvements like built-in internet capabilities allowing geographically dispersed players to play with each other. Other computer games followed adding modem and LAN functionality to allow simultaneous players and ultimately making it a requirement instead of an optional game feature.

MMOs

The rise of massively multiplayer online games popularity came when Origin Systems launched Ultima Online reaching up to 50,000 simultaneous subscribers within the first three months. Turbine Entertainment made Asheron’s Call and Verant Interactive (which was later acquired by Sony) created EverQuest which later became the largest massively multiplayer online role playing game claiming to have over 500,000 simultaneous players.

As the information revolution, fueled by the availability of the World Wide Web, infused with the mainstream American Culture, computer games became even more interactive allowing players to immerse themselves in a persistent, fantasy world with the ability to customize their own character, forming collaborative teams and guilds to perform a common goal and engage in adventurous quests which ultimately brings us to this time.

New Frontiers

Augmented reality developments like Oculus Rift’s virtual reality headgear and University of Southern California’s Project Holodeck allows us to venture even more to uncharted lands in video game experience. Surely we have come a long way from text-based rpgs and nongraphical MUDs but with these new technological advances one can see that there is still wide a horizon of possibilites that are yet to be achieved.

on fantasy worlds filled with unbelievable magic, fierce monsters and laser guns

I’ve been surfing the web to find the next game title I can waste my summer with only to find that most games currently in the market, if you scrape them with their fancy graphical exterior,  are no more than clones of each other. So much for the “brooding, buzz cut (or hooded), anti-hero protagonist”, indecently dressed women, parkour antics, and “surprise! you’re the villain” themes. Although they are very successful in capturing the lucrative, emotionally ridden, angst-driven, male teen market, we haven’t really had the time to ask: have we really reached a plateau that we can no longer add something better (aside from very high-poly graphics that could eat all the processing power of your 6GB gpu) to the previous titles to come up with a newer, better game?

If you happen to say yes, then let me walk you through. The gaming industry is the fastest growing segment of the entertainment market generating revenues of more than $30 billion per year (which is roughly 400 games being sold every minute) surpassing film box office and music concert revenues in the US alone. According to an industry impact study conducted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), in several countries, exports from games sales represent one of the highest exports and due to a substantial decrease in game development time and the opening of new avenues of sharing digital artifacts, game production is estimated to be well over 4 billion titles per year, including consoles and coin-op programs.

The million-dollar question now is: If this is the case, then why can’t we see more and newer game ideas concepts instead?

To understand this, let’s have a quick history recap. The first time mmo standards bar was set was in March 1999 by Verant’s (SoE) Everquest which brought fantasy mmorpgs in western mainstream. Launched with modest expectations, it quickly surpassed Ultima Online in subscriptions and was even named the best mmo. It features an extensive graphics that dominated any other game of its time and was the first to offer 3D first person gameplay. It was designed to for solo, group or raid style play.

Then came Blizard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft in 2006 which redefines mmo possibilities. They are currently in their fourth expansion (Mists of Pandaria), which is by far the most extensive expansion. Two opposing factions – Horde and Alliance, creates a sense of role-playing and advocates the game’s back story. PvP, unlike other games,  is as strong focus as PvE as well as a heavy support on cross realm battleground, dungeon and zone contents.

Then in 2012, TERA introduces a true action combat to remove the boredom brought by auto-attack of targeted combat to be called the first ever “Realtime Battle System”. The ability to dodge enemy attacks and aim your attacks allows skill to be a major factor over gear/level.

As game designers we must be able to look at these games to see what they have done wrong and what they have done right and building on them to create better game systems instead of blindly cloning existing titles. One of the most common mistakes a game developer will do is staying too close to the original design and not being able to weed out what is good and build upon them. Nearly every successful game is followed up by a dozen lesser knock offs or stretched through so many sequels that whatever unique appeal it once held inevitably becomes tiresome.

Quick-time events, damsels in distress, brooding power-armoured space marines, overly simple puzzles (that are more of hassle than a challenge), morality meters, sandbox environments, zombies (including but not limited to – zombie-robots, zombie neighborhoods, zombie zoomorphs, even zombie-zombies) , vampires, really bad comic relief characters which falls flat as roadkills, bullet time, collectibles and fetch quests are some of the things that, in my opinion not just as a game developer but also as a gamer, have become so overused that they bore the hell out of you.

But don’t be confused though. Now while completely new and original ideas are certainly preferred and should be celebrated when attempted (they won’t always be good after all) there’s no reason that a game taking inspiration from or expanding on the idea of another can’t be great in their own right. Often originality comes simply from finding a new angle on an already well established concept.