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.
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